Some years ago the Surf House was the finest place of entertainment, but it has now many rivals, taller if not finer. Congress Hall, under the management of Mr. G.W. Hinkle, is a universal favorite, while the Senate House, standing under the shadow of the lighthouse, has the advantage of being the nearest to the beach of all the hotels. Both are ample and hospitable hostelries, where you are led persuasively through the Eleusinian mystery of the Philadelphia cuisine. Schaufler's is an especial resort of our German fellow-citizens, who may there be seen enjoying themselves in the manner depicted by our artist, while concocting—as we are warned by M. Henri Kowalski—the ambitious schemes which they conceal under their ordinary enveloppe débonnaire.
There is another feature of the place. With its rarely fine atmosphere, so tonic and bracing, so free from the depressing fog of the North, it is a great sanitarium. There are seasons when the Pennsylvania University seems to have bred its wealth of doctors for the express purpose of marshaling a dying world to the curative shelter of Atlantic City. The trains are encumbered with the halt and the infirm, who are got out at the doors like unwieldy luggage in the arms of nurses and porters. Once arrived, however, they display considerable mobility in distributing themselves through the three or four hundred widely-separated cottages which await them for hire. As you wander through the lanes of these cunning little houses, you catch strange fragments of conversation. Gentlemen living vis-à-vis, and standing with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas, are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse of each other's doctor. There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians. The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms, set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with invalids describing their own complaints. Or the sufferers turn their batteries on each other. On the verandah of a select boarding-house we have seen a fat lady of forty lying on a bench like a dead harlequin, as she rolled herself in the triangles of a glittering afghan. On a neighboring seat a gouty subject, and a tropical sun pouring on both.
"Good-morning! You see I am trying my sun-bath. I am convinced it relieves my spine." The same remark has introduced seven morning conversations.
"And my gout has shot from the index toe to the ring toe. I feared my slipper was damp, and I am roasting it here. But, dear ma'am, I pity you so with your spine! Tried acupuncture?"
The patient probably hears the word as Acapulco. For she answers, "No, but I tried St. Augustine last winter. Not a morsel of good."
Among these you encounter sometimes lovely, frail, transparent girls, who come down with cheeks of wax, and go home in two months with cheeks of apple. Or stout gentlemen arriving yellow, and going back in due time purple.
Once a hardened siren of many watering-places, large and blooming, arrived at Atlantic City with her latest capture, a stooping invalid gentleman of good family in Rhode Island. They boated, they had croquet on the beach, they paced the shining sands. Both of them people of the world and past their first youth, they found an amusement in each other's knowing ways and conversation that kept them mutually faithful in a kind of mock-courtship. The gentleman, however, was evidently only amusing himself with this travesty of sentiment, though he was never led away by the charms of younger women. After a month of it he succeeded in persuading her for the first time to enter the water, and there he assisted her to take the billows in the gallant American fashion. Her intention of staying only in the very edge of the ocean he overruled by main force, playfully drawing her out where a breaker washed partially over her. As the water touched her face she screamed, and raised her arm to hide the cheek that had been wet. She then ran hastily to shore, and her friend, fearing some accident, made haste to rejoin her. His astonishment was great at finding one of her cheeks of a ghastly, unhealthy white. Her color had always been very high. That afternoon she sought him and explained. She was really an invalid, she said calmly, and had recently undergone a shocking operation for tumor. But she saw no reason for letting that interfere with her usual summer life, particularly as she felt youth and opportunity making away from her with terrible strides. Having a chance to enjoy his society which might never be repeated, fearing lest his rapid disease should carry him away from before her eyes, she had concluded to make the most of time, dissemble her suffering, and endeavor to conceal by art the cold bloodlessness of her face. This whimsical, worldly heroism happened to strike the gentleman strangely. He was affected to the point of proposing marriage. At the same time he perceived with some amazement that his disease had left him: the, curative spell of the region had wrought its enchantment upon his system. They were wedded, with roles reversed—he as the protector and she as the invalid—and were truly happy during the eighteen months that the lady lived as his wife.
