Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/48

42 them and the Coast Range, together form the county of that name. It is famous for its dairies, its strawberries, its vegetables, but, most of all, for its sea-bathing. No one is presumed to be in the fashion, who has not been to Clatsop Beach: therefore, to Clatsop we are going—have gone. We like the place, though it is as little like Newport or Long Branch as possible, having for an hotel a one-storied wooden building, brilliant externally with whitewash, internally not brilliant at all, nor elegantly furnished, being the residence of a family of French half-breeds. The cuisine is all that a Frenchman could desire; but the house and grounds are decidedly of a by-gone order of architecture and arrangement. When the house is overrun with visitors, the later comers are domiciled in tents. Perhaps it is this very lack of conventional luxury which makes the place popular; for it never is deserted during the warm season, but every year increases the number of its visitors. Sea-air, bathing, riding, hunting, good living, and the absence of those usual conventionalities which make life refined and monotonous, continue to "draw" more and more largely, so that shortly some sharp-sighted party will be found erecting the hotels and cottages of a crowded watering-place.

There are certainly here many attractions lacking in most sea-bathing resorts: a trout-stream, a forest for hunting in, where any thing may be found, from a deer to an elk, or a bear. Geese, ducks, plover, and snipe frequent the mouth of the creek, while sea-gulls, cranes, and eagles give picturesqueness to the beach-views. Three or four miles to the east, the peaks of the Coast Range fret the blue of the summer sky, a spur from which range comes down quite to the sea,