One of the most striking natural phenomena of the hotel closing was the
arrival of the gulls on our beach, or rather on the waters beyond the
beach. I had wondered at their absence all August long, but punctually
on the first day of September they came. The weather had not changed
for them any more than it had for the guests who fled the place at the
same date, but perhaps the wild wheeling and screaming things had a
prescience of the autumnal storms, and came with prophetic welcome in
their wings.
Otherwise the premonitions of change were within the hotel itself, and
they were more impressive whenever they assumed an official character.
It was with a real emotion that one day I missed one of the clerks out
of the number within the office. He was there, and then he was not
there; it was as if he had been lost overboard during his watch. I
had scarcely recovered from his loss when another clerk, upon whose
distribution of the mail we all used to hang impatient for the equal
disappointment of letters or no letters, ceased from his ministrations
as if he had all along been a wraith of mist, and had simply melted
away. The room clerk, who was a more definite personality to us, went
next, with a less supernatural effect; he even said he might come back,
but he did not come back, and the office force was reduced to the
cashier and a young clerk not perceptible earlier in the season.
At all great hotels the landlord is usually a remote and problematical
personage, and so it was with ours until the office force began to
thin away around him. Then he became more and more visible, tangible,
conversable, and proved a distinctly agreeable addition to our circle,
in which the note of an increasing domesticity was struck. I do not
know of anything that gave so keen a sense of our resolution into a
single family, still large, but insensibly drawn together by the need
of a mutual comfort and encouragement, as the invasion of the hotel
by a multitude of crickets. Whether it was the departure of the human
host which tempted the crickets in-doors, or whether it was some such
instinct as brought the gulls to our seas, they were all at once
all over the place, piercing its deepening silence with their harsh
stridulation. In the chambers they carked so loud and clear that one
could hardly sleep for them, and in the glooming reaches and expanses
of the corridors, parlors, halls, and dining-room they shrilled in
incessant chorus.