And in front of these, a clumsy fishing boat rose and fell on each passing wave. Two sailors sat in the stern, holding the rope and tiller, and in the bow, with their backs turned forever toward Opeki, stood two young boys, their faces lit by the glow of the setting sun and stirred by the sight of the great engines of war plunging past them on their errand of vengeance.
“Stedman,” said the elder boy, in an awe-struck whisper, and with a wave of his hand, “we have not lived in vain.”
MIDSUMMER PIRATES.
The boys living at the Atlantic House, and the boys boarding at Chadwick’s, held mutual sentiments of something not unlike enmity—feelings of hostility from which even the older boarders were not altogether free. Nor was this unnatural under the circumstances.
When Judge Henry S. Carter and his friend Dr. Prescott first discovered Manasquan, such an institution as the Atlantic House seemed an impossibility, and land improvement companies, Queen Anne cottages, and hacks to and from the railroad station, were out of all calculation. At that time “Captain” Chadwick’s farmhouse, though not rich in all the modern improvements of a seaside hotel, rejoiced in a table covered three times a day with the good things from the farm. The river back of the house was full of fish, and the pine woods along its banks were intended by nature expressly for the hanging of hammocks.
The chief amusements were picnics to the head of the river (or as near the head as the boats could get through the lily-pads), crabbing along the shore, and races on the river itself, which, if it was broad, was so absurdly shallow that an upset meant nothing more serious than a wetting and a temporary loss of reputation as a sailor.
But all this had been spoiled by the advance of civilization and the erection of the Atlantic House.
The railroad surveyors, with their high-top boots and transits, were the first signs of the approaching evils. After them came the Ozone Land Company, which bought up all the sand hills bordering on the ocean, and proceeded to stake out a flourishing “city by the sea” and to erect sign-posts in the marshes to show where they would lay out streets named after the directors of the Ozone Land Company and the Presidents of the United States.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that the Carters, and the Prescotts, and all the judge’s clients, and the doctor’s patients, who had been coming to Manasquan for many years, and loved it for its simplicity and quiet, should feel aggrieved at these great changes. And though the young Carters and Prescotts endeavored to impede the march of civilization by pulling up the surveyor’s stakes and tearing down the Land Company’s sign-posts, the inevitable improvements marched steadily on.
I hope all this will show why it was that the boys who lived at the Atlantic House—and dressed as if they were still in the city, and had “hops” every evening—were not pleasing to the boys who boarded at Chadwick’s, who never changed their flannel suits for anything more formal than their bathing-dresses, and spent the summer nights on the river.