The Lure of Long Beach (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1914 Excerpt: ... VI OLD BOND'S OLLOWING the Revolutionary "days that tried men's souls" an era of comparative peace settled Ml. over the new United States, and nature set about her long-deferred experiment of molding from every specimen of immigrant from Europe a distinctive nation. And this new nation--this modern world-experiment--has proved itself successful, and has developed aggressive and forceful characteristics in the dwellers of the United States that for want of a better name we term American. Thus we have American shrewdness, American humor, American slang, American unconventionality, American democracy. And in no one place is American democracy more potent than at the seashore during the height of the summer season. John Bull makes almost a religious rite of it when he a-bathing goes, and his solemn ponderosity as he emerges from his bathing machine and enters the water at any of the Old World watering places brings the wrinkles of a smile to the face of a real American. But on the New Jersey coast snobbery is almost unknown among lovers of the sea, and especially on the Long Beach section has the true spirit of cosmopolitanism maintained its sway from the earliest days. Seashore life in midsummer began in a small way--as all great things do--on Tucker's Beach or Short Beach, which is now a part of Long Beach, although formerly separated from that long-drawn-out island by the old inlet, which filled up entirely in 1874, so that men and women walked across dryshod from Long to Short Beach. When it is recalled that even as late as 1848 this old inlet was two miles wide, and that it was navigable for the smaller coasting vessels even up to the year 1866, the changes wrought in the configuration of the New Jersey coast by old ocean will be faintly realized. Traditio...