e. The
officiating minister, kneeling at the desk, gesticulated furiously,
doubled up his fists and shook them on high, stretched out both arms,
and pounded the pulpit. Among people of his own race King had never
before seen anything like this, and he went away a sadder if not a wiser
man, having at least learned one lesson of charity--never again to speak
lightly of a negro religious meeting.

This vast city of the sea has many charms, and is the resort of
thousands of people, who find here health and repose. But King, who was
immensely interested in it all as one phase of American summer life, was
glad that Irene was not at Ocean Grove.

XI. SARATOGA

It was the 22d of August, and the height of the season at Saratoga.
Familiar as King had been with these Springs, accustomed as the artist
was to foreign Spas, the scene was a surprise to both. They had been
told that fashion had ceased to patronize it, and that its old-time
character was gone. But Saratoga is too strong for the whims of fashion;
its existence does not depend upon its decrees; it has reached the point
where it cannot be killed by the inroads of Jew or Gentile. In ceasing
to be a society centre, it has become in a manner metropolitan; for the
season it is no longer a provincial village, but the meeting-place of
as mixed and heterogeneous a throng as flows into New York from all the
Union in the autumn shopping period.

It was race week, but the sporting men did not give Saratoga their
complexion. It was convention time, but except in the hotel corridors
politicians were not the feature of the place. One of the great hotels
was almost exclusively occupied by the descendants of Abraham, but the
town did not at all resemble Jerusalem. Innumerable boarding-houses
swarmed with city and country clergymen, who have a well-founded
impression that the waters of the springs have a beneficent relation to
the bilious secretions of the year, but the resort had not an oppressive
air of sanctity. Nearly every prominent politician in the State and a
good many from other States registered at the hotels, but no one seemed
to think that the country was in danger. Hundreds of men and women were
there because they had been there every year for thirty or forty years
back, and they have no doubt that their health absolutely requires a
week at Saratoga; yet the village has not the aspect of a sanitarium.
The hotel dining-rooms and galleries were thronged with large,
o