se around in
the deep water for food. They are of no use to anybody, either for their
skin or their flesh. Nothing could be more thoroughly disgusting and
uncanny than they are, and yet nothing more fascinating. One can watch
them--the irresponsible, formless lumps of intelligent flesh--for hours
without tiring. I scarcely know what the fascination is. A small seal
playing by himself near the shore, floating on and diving under the
breakers, is not so very disagreeable, especially if he comes so near
that you can see his pathetic eyes; but these brutes in this perpetual
summer resort are disgustingly attractive. Nearly everything about them,
including their voice, is repulsive. Perhaps it is the absolute idleness
of the community that makes it so interesting. To fish, to swim, to
snooze on the rocks, that is all, for ever and ever. No past, no future.
A society that lives for the laziest sort of pleasure. If they were rich,
what more could they have? Is not this the ideal of a watering-place
life?

The spectacle of this happy community ought to teach us humility and
charity in judgment. Perhaps the philosophy of its attractiveness lies
deeper than its 'dolce far niente' existence. We may never have
considered the attraction for us of the disagreeable, the positive
fascination of the uncommonly ugly. The repulsive fascination of the
loathly serpent or dragon for women can hardly be explained on
theological grounds. Some cranks have maintained that the theory of
gravitation alone does not explain the universe, that repulsion is as
necessary as attraction in our economy. This may apply to society. We are
all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so
violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom
and color. But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the
leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic
mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out? It is not contrast
altogether. For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and
again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut in
by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these wind-swept
plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons. We shall long
to be weary of it all again--its vast nakedness, its shimmering heat, its
cold, star-studded nights. It seems paradoxical, but it is probably true,
that a society composed altogether of agreeabl