Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/268

 tables. This seems to enrage them. Finally they can stand it no longer. Their vast rawhide marching boots go clumping into the dining room. Every now and then the announcer comes to the head of the stairway and calls out something about a train to Harrisburg, Altoona, Pittsburgh and Chicago. There is a note of sadness in his long-drawn wail, as though it would break his heart if no one should take this train, which is a favorite of his. A few weary casuals hoist themselves from the benches, gather their belongings anew and stagger away.

sands are lonely in the fall. On those broad New Jersey beaches, where the rollers sprawl inward in ridges of crumbling snow, the ocean looks almost wistfully for its former playmates. The children are gone, the small brown legs, the toy shovels and the red tin pails. The familiar figures of the summer season have vanished: the stout ladies who sat in awninged chairs and wrestled desperately to unfurl their newspapers in the wind; the handsome mahogany-tanned lifesavers, the vamperinoes incessantly drying their tawny hair, the corpulent males of dark complexion wearing ladies' bathing caps, the young men playing a degenerate baseball with a rubber sphere and a bit of shingle. All that life and excitement, fed upon hot dogs and vanilla cones, anointed with cold