The place lost nothing in the morning light, and it was a sparkling morning with a fresh breeze. Nature, with its love of simple, sweeping lines, and its feeling for atmospheric effect, has done everything for the place, and bad taste has not quite spoiled it. There is a sloping, shallow beach, very broad, of fine, hard sand, excellent for driving or for walking, extending unbroken three miles down to Cape May Point, which has hotels and cottages of its own, and lifesaving and signal stations. Off to the west from this point is the long sand line to Cape Henlopen, fourteen miles away, and the Delaware shore. At Cape May Point there is a little village of painted wood houses, mostly cottages to let, and a permanent population of a few hundred inhabitants. From the pier one sees a mile and a half of hotels and cottages, fronting south, all flaming, tasteless, carpenter's architecture, gay with paint. The sea expanse is magnificent, and the sweep of beach is fortunately unencumbered, and vulgarized by no bath-houses or show-shanties. The bath-houses are in front of the hotels and in their enclosures; then come the broad drive, and the sand beach, and the sea. The line is broken below by the lighthouse and a point of land, whereon stands the elephant. This elephant is not indigenous, and he stands alone in the sand, a wooden sham without an explanation. Why the hotel-keeper's mind along the coast regards this grotesque structure as a summer attraction it is difficult to see. But when one resort had him, he became a necessity everywhere. The travelers walked down to this monster, climbed the stairs in one of his legs, explored the rooms, looked out from the saddle, and pondered on the problem. This beast was unfinished within and unpainted without, and already falling into decay. An elephant on the desert, fronting the Atlantic Ocean, had, after all, a picturesque aspect, and all the more so because he was a deserted ruin. The elephant was, however, no emptier than the cottages about which our friends strolled. But the cottages were all ready, the rows of new chairs stood on the fresh piazzas, the windows were invitingly open, the pathetic little patches of flowers in front tried hard to look festive in the dry sands, and the stout landladies in their rocking-chairs calmly knitted and endeavored to appear as if they expected nobody, but had almost a houseful.