The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-10-14 00:00:00

A SUNDAY AT LONG BRANCH.

Under the hoed of "Americw Watering Places," the
Special C wreepondent of The Times, writing from Phita-
d&phtt, gives an interesting lotter describing a Stulday which
he spent at Long Branch :

In the last number of the Quarterly Rainy it is very
justly remarked that an Englishman travelling in
America finds so much to remind him of his own
country that he soon begins to take the many points of
resemblance for granted, and to note only the few
points of difference. lam quoting from memory, and
do not pretend to give the writer's words, but this is,
I think, in substance his idea. The traveller, in fact,
reverses the process which he would use in, say, China
or Japan, where, finding most things unlike those of
his own land, he would pick out what little was like.
The latter would strike him as more curious, and a
traveller fastens upon the curious as instinctively as a
terrier upon a rat. In this way the close and manifold
resemblance between England and America comes to
be so thrown in the background as to be almost lost
sight of, while.the difference is put so prominently in
the foreground as to make superficisl thinkers con-
clude that the two countries are, in customs and
modes of thought and feeling, as wide asunder as the
Poles. . .

The Quarterly Reviewer might have gone on to say
that not merely does the Englishman in America dwell
most upon what is unlike England, but, further, he
finds it brought out, as it were into bold relief, and
forced upon his notice by its juxtaposition to so much
that is like. It has all the advantage or disadvantage,
as the case may be, of an immediate contrast, such as
he, probably, would not fiad in any other country of
the world. He may take up, for instance, the New
York Herald, and find on one page an article on Mr.
Disraeli's elevation to the Peerage, or a review of
"Daniel Deronda," so thoroughly English in its tone
and exact information that he can scarcely believe he
is not reading a first-class Lcadoa paper; he turns
over, and on the next page may light on something
so utterly un-English that he does not know what
to make of it; he has no sort of standard of compari-
son by which to measure it. Its strangeness would,
however, have far less impressed him if he had found
it in a foreign fanguage, or anywhere but alongside
what seemed so genuine an English product. I came
recently upon a similar contrast when spending a
Sunday at Long Branch, the most fashionable and,
perhaps, most American of the many watering-places
along the New Jersey coast. In my host's pretty,
pleasant cottage by the seashore there was far lees to
remind me that I was in a strange land than to make
me fancy myself in my own. I heard one guest as-
signed the blue room, another guest the brown. The
bed was of truly British dimensions, large enough to
hold a stout couple, or to make, say, half a dozen of
the narrow grave-like cots in which the Frenchman
squeezes himself to sleep. The jug and basin were as
British as the bed. A dressing-room with a large bath
adjoined the bedroom. A substantial breakfast was
served at the English hour and, with tea and coff-e.
in the English style. My host had left his library
behind him at Philadelphia; bat coming upon
one bracket filed with books, I had the
curiosity to examine them, and found them all,
with one exception—Longfellow—were English;
and, from my present point of view, Longfellow cannot
be considered an exception,aince he would have occu-
pied the same place if the cottage had been in England.
After breakfast came morning church, where, the
church being Episcopal, the service was essentially
what it is in England, the tew differences being so
trivial as to escape the attention of any one not on the
look-out for them. The surpliced clergyman only
wanted a hood to make him an English University
graduate, for, as an American neighbour remarked to
me, he had "quite the English accent." To crown the
general resemblance, a collection was made after ser-
vice on an open plate handed from pew to pew, so that
it was impossible not to let even your neighbour's right
hand know what your own left gave. The whole cere-
mony, in fact, wass.from beginning to end, so English,
that an Englishman of our party, carried away irre-
sistibly by the all-powerful law of association, slept
through the sermon in as tranquil and masterly a
manner as if he had been at home in his family pew.
Church over, our host led us, like a second. Moses,
right through the waters of the Channel from England
into France. In plain prose he took us to the house of
one of his intimate friends. The lady of the house VMS
" sick " and invisible, but was most adequately repre-
Rented by her daughters. They, too, had been to church,
but we had not had time to do justice to the inevitable 1
shortcomings of the sermon and the preacher's unpro-
fessionally English accent, when two young men
called, and I scarcely believed my British ears as,
on a Sunday morning, fresh from a Church of England
service, I not only heard them invite the ladies,
quite as a matter of course, to come and bathe, but
heard the invitation at once, equally as a matter of
course, accepted. Long Branch is called the Brighton
of America. Imagine the sensation which would be
produced in the original Brighton by a party of
ladies and gentlemen from Kemp Town, not London
excursionists, on a Sunday afternoon disappearing for
a few minutes into huts lining the esplanade, and then
emerging, in bathing suits, to go and take all together
a dip in the sea. The cottage at which we were visit-
ing had two neat little bathing huts of its own, one for
ladies, one for gentlemen, on the side of the grand
promenade, but not as at Cape May, the wrong side.
'The bashful bather has not slowly to steal his way
through a crowd of well-filled carriages and fashion-
ably-dressed loungers, but, though he must "break
cover" in full view of them, he can be down the
steps, across the beach, and into the sea in no time.
Not, however, that the most bashful even of Britons
need hurry or flurry himself with so many fellow-
bathers to keep him in countenance. On this occa-
sion the beach was as crowded with bathers and
lookers-on, and as full of movement and merriment,
an if the scene had been laid at Biarritz. By the
way, I should have said that our host had taken
us, not into France, but into French America.
For the freedom enjoyed by the young ladies of the
party was as un-French as the Sunday bathing of both
sexes in company was un-English. The American
has philosophically picked out of each old system just
what part happens to suit him, and has made a com-
bination essentially his own. It must not be supposed
however, that Puritanism has entisely lost, even in
in gay Long Branch. its once firm grip on the national
mind. Some of the ladies declined to bathe, evidently
on account of the day, though they made no parade of
their reasons. Besides, as a counterpoise to the
French levity of Long Branch we had, within "a sea-
bath day's journey," the ultro-British seriousness of
Ocean grove, with its fine beach given up to praying
and singing, instead of bathing, and its great yearly
camp-meeting just at that moment in full play. It
must have had an odd effect to drive, as some of the
excursionists did in a few moments, from one beach to
the other, an if from a Royalist into a Roundhead
camp. The atmosphere of America is, both morally
physically, so broad that every variety of sect and
opinion can find free breathing room in it without
interfering with any other.
In the afternoon we were again on English ground,
and in the evening we even penetrated into a Cathedral
close. Our host took us to call on a Bishop, in figure,
demeanour, "accent," and apron so exactly like an
English Bishop that I was not at all surprised after-
wards to learn that Mr. Tennyson had stoutly main-
tained, in the fase of the strongest evidence, that this
particular Bishop could in no wia3 be American. The
resemblance was, in fact so striking that, having that
very afternoon read the article in the Quarterly Review,
I began to search for some difference, and fancy that,
from a strictly English point of view, there was eome-
thing wrong, I mean unepiscopal, about his Lordship's
legs, though I don't quite know what it was. My
knowledge of Bishops is derived chiefly from Mr.
Anthony Trollope's novels, but I have somehow learnt
to regard
,gaiters and silk stockings as "inseparable
accidents,' logically speaking, of Episcopal legs, and
the American Bishop had neither. His manner and
conversation were so charming that I feel heartily
ashamed of having let even a Qu2rterly Reviewer lead
me into noticing anything so trivial as a difference in
dress, though as a conscientious historian, in the act of
comparing American and English ways, I feel bound to
record it.

As the simplest way of convincing us that we were
really on his side of the Atlantic, our host took us from
the ,very English Bishop to the very American Presi-
dent. Englishmen, who are accustomed to think of the
President of the United States as one of the most
powerful rulers in the world, a ruler compared with
whom any Monarch of a Constitutional country is
politically almost a cipher, are not a little astonished
to find him leading the life of an ordinary private citizen
of comfortable, but moderate, means. There is nothing
to distinguish his "cottage" from those of his neigh-
bours, except that all day the passing excursionists
have been craning their necks over his fences in the
hope of getting a peep at him as he walks from
room to room, some of them having taken the
judicious precaution to bring opera-glasses. If any
one ventured to hint to them that their conduct
was scarcely Chesterfieldian, and that they might
themselves, as free American citizens, resent having
their private houses thusstared into, they would pro-
bably reply that the President was public property,
and that they had as much right to stare at him as to
shake hands with him, the latter right being as un-
questioned as the right to vote for him. No less
indefeasible, I need scarcely say is the right to
abuse him. Before he was persuaded, against, it is
said, his own private wish and for the sake of
his party, to give up the dignified, congenial,
and well-paid office of Commander-in-Chief, which
he would have held for life, he was the conqueror of
the South, the restorer of the Union, the saviour of
. his country, —everything, in fact, by which the
nation could show its grateful appreciation of all
he had done. In office, he is pursued, as a matter of
course, by the most virulent and Nin dictive abuse,
though, notwithstanding the mass of mud thrown at
him, even his enemies are obliged to admit that, what-
ever his friends or colleagaes may have been, the
President's personal integrity is without stain. Now
that his puccessor is nominated, and he himself, as it
were, on his official death-bed, justice is again be-
ginning to be done to him, and there is little doubt
that some day the nation will discover that the price-
less services he has rendered to his country should
award him a place in public esteem little lower than
that of Washington and Lincoln. He has indeed,
only to die for the dime )very to be made at once, but
he would, perhaps, rather postpone this apotheosis,—at
least until he has "done" Europe, which he talks of
visiting as soon as his term of office expires. Every
Englishman must hope that in England he will be ac-
corded the reception to which his high reputation and
illustrious career, and, perhaps, to a certain extent, the
harsh treatment which has lately been dealt out to him
--
here so amply entitle him.

In connection with the above a correspondent, "B. H,"
writing from Philadelphia to the Pall Nall Gazett:, com-
ments as follows upon the freedom of socl,l intercJurse at
Axaerlean watering-places :
A striking peculiarity of life at Cape May and Long
Branch—and these places may be taken as illustrations
of nearly all American resorts except Newport—is the
general absence of even those slight distinctions which
mark the 'various circles of Eociety in the home cities
of this country. This to a stranger is one of the most
curious phases of summer life in America, and it can-
not be understood by the application of any rules
known to the society of England or the Continent. It
is made possible by a single unwritten law of the
American social code w4ich is universall7 reoog;
Aud the anthodti

abed,