Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/273

  wife who runs the little candy and sarsaparilla counter on the dock has ended her labors. She is glad to get back to her kitchen: during the long, busy summer days she did her family cooking on an oil stove behind the counter. The captain, as he likes to be called, is about to make his annual change from mariner to roofer, the latter being his winter trade. "It's blowing up for rain," he says, looking over his shoulder at the eastern sky. "I guess the season's pretty near over. I'll get up the rest of them boats next week."

In September the bathing is at its best. Particularly at sunset, when every one is at supper. To cross those wide fields of wiry grass that stretch down to the sand, is an amazement to the eye. Ahead of you the sea gleams purple as an Easter violet. The fields are a kind of rich palette on which every tint of pink, russet and bronze are laid in glowing variation. The softly wavering breeze, moving among the coarse stalks, gives the view a ripple and shimmer of color like shot silk. A naturalist could find hundreds of species of flowers and grasses on those sandy meadows. There are great clumps of some bushy herb that has already turned a vivid copper color, and catches the declining sunlight like burnished metal. There are flecks of yellow, pink and lavender. A cool, strong odor rises from the harsh, knife-edged grasses—a curiously dry, brittle scent, familiar to all who have poked about sand dunes.