There are a score and more of apartment-houses, and three hundred and fifty private residences ranging from unconsciously simple little ten-thousand-dollar bungalows up to artfully simple little two-hundred-thousand-dollar cottages.

Within another six years, according to the more sane and conservative Miami Beach predicters, there will be six or seven more hotels at Miami Beach, all larger than the Flamingo. Fisher has another modest caravansary planned which is to have an ice-rink, covered tennis courts and a tanbark horse-show enclosure on the roof. Unless his friends lock him up, he is sure to carry out his plans—which will probably be as highly successful as his past ventures.

A few of his friends no longer fear for his sanity. His former business partner in Indianapolis, James A. Allison, has even helped the good work along by building and stocking at Miami Beach an aquarium that rivals the great aquariums of Monaco, Naples, Honolulu and Manila. A great many of his friends, however, still shake their heads pityingly when they hear mention of hotels with ice-rinks on the roof.

The dredging operations which had transferred sand from the bottom of Biscayne Bay to the top of Miami Beach had left several unsightly mud banks protruding a few inches from the surface of the bay. Fisher surrounded these mud banks with bulkheads and pumped more mud into them. The result was seven beautiful islands, most of which are already shaded by palm groves and dotted with simple but beautiful homes costing about thirty dollars a square inch. They are easy of access, since they are connected with the mainland or the causeway.

Some Miami people have likened these islands to lilies which o’erlace the sea, after the fashion of Senator Lodge quoting from Browning in an attempt to explain the islands of the Pacific to a concourse of hard-boiled hearers; but Palm Beach folk, with that peculiar jealousy evinced by the residents of one Florida resort toward everything in a rival Florida resort, say that they look more like floating flapjacks. The truth, of course, lies between; and when they are covered with masses of tropical foliage, there will be nothing flapjackish about them. One of the islands, together with an obelisk rising from its center, was constructed as a memorial to Henry M. Flagler, without whose vision and foresight Florida would probably only be known as the place that Florida Water was named after. One of the largest islands has an area of sixty acres. A mile of bulkhead, with bulkheading at twelve dollars a foot, was necessary in its construction, and its total cost was half a million dollars.

The inability of ninety per cent. of the human race to see how a thing is going to look when finished has cost the human race a large amount of money at Miami Beach. Not long ago, for example, an effort was made to sell a new house for sixteen thousand dollars. It stood on new flat land, however, and there were no trees or shrubs around it. Everybody who saw it refused to buy it; so three thousand five hundred dollars was spent in planting grass, palms and flowers and adding walks and a boathouse. When this had been done, the house sold instantly for thirty thousand dollars to one of the men who had refused to pay sixteen thousand for it the preceding year.

CHAPTER XII

OF ONE-PIECE AND TWO-FIFTHS-PIECE BATHING SUITS—OF THE HONORABLE WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN AND HIS ACTIVITIES—OF BOOTLEGGERS—OF THE SANCTIMONIOUS HAIG AND HAIG BOYS—AND OF RUM IN GENERAL.

Miami and Miami Beach are now connected by a curving concrete causeway three and a half miles long. New and spacious as it is, it is often too small to accommodate the thousands of automobiles that hasten out to Miami Beach on hot Sunday afternoons in mid-winter in order that their occupants may obtain an eyeful, as the saying goes of the bathing crowds. The prudish element hasn’t yet been able to make its influence felt at Miami Beach to any noticeable extent. The one-piece bathing suit is heavily displayed by engaging young women, and there are also large numbers of bathing suits which appear to be one-half-piece or even two-fifths-piece. The latter variety of bathing suit is never worn with stockings; for no stockings—so far as is known—have yet been made long enough to reach to the hips. A striking effect is frequently obtained by the wearers of these two-fifths-piece bathing suits when they stroll out on the beach in short, hip-length capes which hang open negligently at the throat. One sees nothing below the cape but several square yards of flesh, and nothing above the cape but several square feet of flesh. It is a sight that gives one pause. When one sees it for the first time, he feels that he ought to hunt up a life-saver sometime later in the day and ask him to go and speak to the young woman and tell her that she has come out without her two-fifths-piece bathing suit. But one soon becomes accustomed to seeing such things—so accustomed, in fact, that one feels disappointed if he doesn’t see them.

The Honorable William Jennings Bryan