The beach is perfect,--hard, firm sand, sloping so gradually into deep water, and with so little undertow and so few dangers, that children can play in the water without attendants.

The village itself is inoffensive, the country about is attractive; but the crowd--the crowd that comes in summer--comes with a rush almost to the hour in July, and takes flight with a greater rush almost to the minute in August,--the crowd overwhelms, submerges, ignores the natural charms of the place, and for the time being nature hides its honest head before the onrush of sham and illusion.
Why do the people come in a week and go in a day?
What is there about Narragansett that keeps every one away until a certain time each year, attracts them for a few weeks, and then bids them off within twenty-four hours?
Just nothing at all.

All attractions the place has--the ocean, the beach, the drives, the country--remain the same; but no one dares come before the appointed time, no one dares stay after the flight begins; no one?
That is hardly true, for in every beautiful spot, by the ocean and in the mountains, there are a few appreciative souls who know enough to make their homes in nature's caressing embrace while she works for their pure enjoyment her wondrous panorama of changing seasons.

There are people who linger at the sea-shore until from the steel-gray waters are heard the first mutterings of approaching winter; there are those who linger in the woods and mountains until the green of summer yields to the rich browns and golden russets of autumn, until the honk of the wild goose foretells the coming cold; these and their kind are nature's truest and dearest friends; to them does she unfold a thousand hidden beauties; to them does she whisper her most precious secrets.
But the crowd--the crowd--the painted throng that steps to the tune of a fiddle, that hangs on the moods of a caterer, whose inspiration is a good dinner, whose aspiration is a new dance,-- that crowd is never missed by any one who really delights in the manifold attractions of nature.
Not that the crowd at Narragansett is essentially other than the crowd at Newport--the two do not mix; but the difference is one of degree rather than kind.

The crowd at Newport is architecturally perfect, while the crowd at Narragansett is in the adobe stage,-- that is the conspicuous difference; the one is pretentious and lives in structures more or less permanent; the other lives in trunks, and is even more pretentious.