


Produced by David Widger





DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE.

By William Dean Howells

1881




I.

Near the verge of a bold promontory stands the hotel, and looks
southeastward over a sweep of sea unbroken to the horizon. Behind it
stretches the vast forest, which after two hundred years has resumed the
sterile coast wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun to
efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold
speculator for whom Jocelyn's is named. The young birches and spruces
are breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn's; the low
blackberry vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded
sidewalks, and obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the
boarders have found squawberries in the public square on the spot where
the band-stand was to have been. The notion of a sea-side resort at
this point was courageously conceived, and to a certain extent it was
generously realized. Except for its remoteness from the railroad, a
drawback which future enterprise might be expected to remedy in some
way, the place has many natural advantages. The broad plateau is cooled
by a breeze from the vast forests behind it, which comes laden with
health and freshness from the young pines; the sea at its feet is warmed
by the Gulf Stream to a temperature delicious for bathing. There
are certainly mosquitoes from the woods; but there are mosquitoes
everywhere, and the report that people have been driven away by them is
manifestly untrue, for whoever comes to Jocelyn's remains. The beach at
the foot of the bluff is almost a mile at its curve, and it is so smooth
and hard that it glistens like polished marble when newly washed by the
tide. It is true that you reach it from the top by a flight of eighty
steps, but it was intended to have an elevator, like those near the
Whirlpool at Niagara. In the mean time it is easy enough to go down, and
the ladies go down every day, taking their novels or their needle-work
with them. They have various notions of a bath: some conceive that it is
bathing to sit in the edge of the water, and emit shrieks as the
surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in, and after a moment of
poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen times, and run out;
yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to the chin for a given
space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly shut and the breath
held. But after the bath they are all of one mind; they lay their shawls
on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair to dry, they doze in the
sun, in such coils and masses as the unconscious figure lends itself to.
When they rise from their beds, they sit in the shelter of the cliff and
knit or sew, while one of them reads aloud, and another stands watch to
announce the coming of the seals, which frequent a reef near the shore
in great numbers. It has been said at rival points on the coast that
the ladies linger there in despair of ever being able to remount to
the hotel. A young man who clambered along the shore from one of those
points reported finding day after day the same young lady stretched out
on the same shawl, drying the same yellow hair, who had apparently
never gone upstairs since the season began. But the recurrence of this
phenomenon in this spot at the very moment when the young man came by
might have been accounted for upon other theories. Jocelyn's was so
secluded that she could not have expected any one to find her there
twice, and if she had expected this she would not have permitted it.
Probably he saw a different young lady each time.

Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at
the suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn's. The landlord has
always believed that Jocelyn's would come up, some day, when times
got better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New
Leyden--arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of
Jocelyn's felt the general crash--will be pushed through yet; and
every summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a
steam-launch running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his
house is visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks
call the vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the
station, and the old frequenters of the place hope that the station will
never be nearer Jocelyn's than at present. Some of them are rich enough
to afford a sojourn at more fashionable resorts; but most of them are
not, though they are often people of polite tastes and of aesthetic
employments. They talk with slight of the large watering-places, and
probably they would not like them, though it is really economy that
inspires their passion for Jocelyn's with most of them, and they know
of the splendid weariness of Newport mostly by hearsay. New arrivals
are not favored, but there are not often new arrivals at Jocelyn's.