cost of setting up new stocks was disallowed
from the expenses of the church. The stocks
themselves nevertheless remained, and no
remonstrance would induce the vicar to consent to
their removal.

Here was a knot demanding— as Horace
himself would have admitted— something in a
machine for its solution. The something in a
machine was the man in the stocks at Midhurst.
They are orderly people at Rogate, although
they were not ashamed to reply very swiftly to
an outrage upon common sense and feeling with
an outbreak of a more respectable description.
With pickaxe and spade the stocks at Rogate
were, upon provocation of the Midhurst case,
uprooted by the villagers. The masses of West
Sussex, to the number of forty, roared out their
three cheers. The one policeman who preserves
order in these regions, was exasperated, and
desired the people to move on. But, the idol of
the vicar was not only pulled up; it was also
sawn into billets, and with part of it they dressed
their meat for it was employed to cook the roast
beef that was eaten in the village at the
anniversary dinner of the Rogate Friendly Society.

    DREAM-LIFE.

     LISTEN, friend, and I will tell you
       Why I sometimes seem so glad,
     Then without a reason changing,
       Soon become so grave and sad.

    Half my life I live a beggar,
      Ragged, helpless, and alone;
     But the other half a monarch,
       With my courtiers round my throne.

     Half my life is full of sorrow,
       Half of joy, still fresh and new;
     One of these lives is a fancy,
       But the other one is true.

     While I live and feast on gladness,
       Still I feel the thought remain;
     This must soon end— nearer, nearer
       Comes the life of grief and pain.

     While I live a wretched beggar,
       One bright hope my lot can cheer:
     Soon, soon, thou shalt have thy kingdom,
       The bright hour is drawing near.

     So you see my life is twofold:
       Half a pleasure, half a grief.
     Thus all joy is somewhat tempered.
       And all sorrow finds relief.

     Which, you ask me, is the real life?
       Which the Dream, the joy or woe?
     Hush, friend! it is little matter,
       And, indeed, I never know.

DOWN AT DIPPINGTON.

BATHING.

WHO invented sea-bathing? Chaucer's wife,
of Bath, says A 1. A 2 says it is a sham, a
fancy not fifty years old, and means only idleness,
exercise, pure air, and unlimited washing.
Men, before nerves were invented, never bathed;
men, who did not use umbrellas for the sun—
who, in fact, did not use umbrellas at all— never
bathed. A 2 goes on to say that half of those
who do bathe, bathe injudiciously, and do
themselves harm; and he asks, with a wicked Wilkes-and-45
look, do the inhabitants of Dippington,
where we are now, bathe? I trow not. I never
saw them. What first set all of us, when
the dog-days set in, rushing down steep places
into the sea? I don't know, yet here I am,
somebody telling me, " You want bracing." It
takes a good many guineas to "brace," I can
tell you, and guineas rhyme to " ninnies." I
came down by railway, was sucked into dark
pea-shooters of tunnels, spat out again into the
sunshine, and was first aware of our propinquity
to the sea by finding the trees diminish, and the
fields get larger and wilder. Suddenly the great
grey shield of the sea displayed itself.

A philanthropic grocer, who afterwards touted
for my custom, showed me lodgings. I
contracted finally for rooms with two old maids—
one deaf, the other with a wax nose. I looked
out on the sea.

The first thing Dippington mothers seem to
tell their children about the sea is to learn to
get something out of it. They are at it all day,
dipping into it as if it were a lucky-bag, and had
never swallowed their fathers or brothers. There
they are, hooking out star-fish, jellies, crabs,
shrimps, parchmenty ribbons of seaweed, purple
strips, pink roots, yellow shells, rubbed down
pebbles, cuttle fish, shreds of liquid glue, green
slimy weed, round bits of slate, and other
shreds and trifles from the great marine store
shop and lottery. They never leave the beach,
those Dippington children, never, for the chalky
walks on the cliffs, where the poppies picked to
pieces show where the lovers have been walking.
No, they like to see the boats building, or the
signal-staff painting. The wetter they get, the
happier they are.

THE SEA AT DIPPINGTON.

The sea at Dippington is, as far as I can
discover at present from my window at the Marine
Crescent, much the same as it is at Shrimpington,
Whitecliff, or any other fashionable bathing-place.
This rippling gown of Amphitrite lias
always a white frill round the skirt of it. In
the morning, when you go to bathe, there is a
silver tinsel shimmer on it, and at dusk a soft
blue grey haze seems to join it to heaven. It
can never make up its mind whether to come in
or go out, and the great object of existence here
at Dippington seems to be to sit exactly opposite
it all day, and stare yourself stupid, by
looking at its broad, vacant face. The result of
this is extreme sleepiness and a tremendous
appetite. Wiggle, the great art-critic, is
great down here with his telescope under
his arm, his dust coat, his buff slippers, and
his boating-hat. He asks the diving-machine
men what such a vessel is " in the offing,"
and puts on a captain air, though I know
he begins to get sick when he passes Gravesend.
Excuse the transition, but that charming
Miss Trippet, the belle of Dippington, has just
passed down the Parade with such a little pink
cockleshell of a bonnet on, and a little blue
parasol, like a grown up air-bell. I wish you
eould see the pretty fits of abstraction she