The girls had ridden over from the village along the highroad, on which they had traveled two days before in the auto-stage. This lower, or "beach" road was a much less important thoroughfare. In places it followed the line of the shore so closely that the unusual high tides that had prevailed that spring, had washed a great deal of white sand across the swamp-grass and out upon it.
So, in places, the girls plodded through sand over their shoe tops. "Might as well go barefooted," declared Agnes, sitting down for the third time to take off her oxfords and shake out the sand.
"You'd find it pretty different, if you tried it," laughed Ruth. "This sand is hot."
"It does seem as though you slipped back half a step each time you tried to go forward," said Tess, seriously. "Aren't we ever going to get there, Ruth?"
"Oh!" cried Dot, suddenly, "isn't that a giraffe? And there's a camel!"
"For goodness' sake!" gasped Agnes, plunging to her feet, and hopping along after her sisters, trying to get on her left shoe. "Is this the African desert?"
"It looks like it," said Ruth, herself amazed.
"And it's hot enough," grumbled Agnes. "Oh! I see! it's a wrecked carousel."
There were decrepit lions and tigers, too; the rain-washed and broken animals were the remains of a carousel, the machinery of which had been taken away. Once somebody had tried to finance a small pleasure resort between the real village of Pleasant Cove and the two tent colonies, but it had been unsuccessful.
The wreck of a "shoot the chutes," the carousel, a dancing pavilion and a short boardwalk with adjacent stands, had been abandoned by the unfortunate promoters. There was a tower--now a "leaning" tower; broken-down swings; an abandoned moving picture palace; and back from the rest of the wreckage, several hundred yards from the sandy shore, the girls saw a rusty looking frame structure, shaped like a shoe, with a flagstaff sticking out of the roof.
"There it is!" cried Tess, eagerly. "And it _does_ look like a shoe."
Originally the house had been a tiny brown cottage set in the midst of a garden. The fence surrounding the place was still well kept. The second story of the cottage had been transformed into the semblance of a congress-gaiter, with windows in the sides and front. It looked as though that huge shoe had been carefully placed upon the rafters of the first floor rooms of the cottage.