throws herself into on that seat under the flagstaff.
Three youngsters have just passed— all
three sputtering— a certain sign, if their dank
hair did not prove it, that they have been bathing.
Indeed, it is surprising how every small thing
cries aloud to one in a watering-place and says,
"You are at Dippington, behave as such." I
look out of vindow now, and lo! on the green,
crackling roof of the verandah below I see a
white shell, and a dry, crimpy, star-fish, dead
and colourless, that have been, I suppose, thrown
in by the last children who occupied this room—
this Dippington tabernacle— that has known so
many occupants, but which a sanguine imagination
might think had been tossed up there some
stormy night by the sea down below there, for
there is only a road, a railing, a grass-plot, an
esplanade, and a cliff and the sands between my
balcony and the poluphlosboyd.

Besides staring yourself into idiocy, walking
your legs to pieces, and getting your feet wet,
I see nothing to be done at Dippington. A
little flirting, a great deal of tea and shrimps,
billiards, novels, and talking to the sailors, that
is our life— that is the creed and constitution of
Dippington. Do anything else, and you become
a Crusoe on a deserted isle.

"I assure you that last night," said Wiggle to
me, as we were on our way to the billiard-table
for a game of pyramids— " that last night, as I
stood by the brink of that mighty ocean, and
looked out over its changeless immensity— its
great burial-ground of fleets and navies— its
miser hoards of treasure that shall never see the
sun— its millions of unrecorded and forgotten
dead— I felt——"

"Like a shrimp, a stale whiting, a dried
haddock?" I suggested.

"— I felt a mere insect— a transitory creature
of less value than the spray that rolled white
at my feet. I returned to my hotel——"

"And called for sherry and soda?"

"Stuff! for my bed-candle; and retired to my
couch a better and a wiser man."

More wrecked-looking men going home from
bathing. Then a great lull— that is breakfast.
Breakfast at Dippington is a solemn thing, so is
dinner, so is tea.

The sirens still haunt the sea-side, I think,
only they have taken to a more respectable
dress, and no longer sit rasping their fingers sore
on Erard's harps. The sirens now are fascinating
widows, with becoming grief in their beautiful
eyes; bewitching maidens, just budding into
womanhood, with round hats and azure " uglies."
The siren widow passed just now, looking down,
thinking either of the last wedding breakfast or
the one that is to come, with violet ribbons
fluttering about her black shawl— poetical grief-
shroud, with a touch of hope trimming it.
Yiolet, or was it mauve?— beautiful compromise
with despair!

Wonderful air of Dippington, that, smelling of
nothing, is yet so odorous of that nothing; so
fresh, yet never cold; so balmy, so summerf'ul,
so flower-kissing, so health-giving! Blessed air,
unpolluted by the fetor of cities! air that
numberless interjections can alone describe, and then
only by showing a redundant sense of pleasure
— a freer pulse, a fuller heart, a brighter eye!
Let the old writers say what they will of the
unsuccessful voyages in the time of Columbus to
discover the miraculous "Fountain of Youth,"
here it is:

THE BATHING-MACHINE.

The first thing, of course, I did when I got
settled at Dippington was to inquire about the
baths. In the true spirit of a discoverer, the
very night I arrived I found my way by sloping
paths to the beach, attracted by the ship lights,
the red signal at the pier-head, and the sharp
clear sound of the ship bells. I saw nothing
before me but the boundless, the illimitable,
the delight of the hardy Norseman, the terror
of the squeamish, the silent highway, the
green bank whose lock no burglar can pick, the
unfillable graveyard, &c. The waves raced in,
white-maned, many-trampling, and swift. They
rolled in, twenty thousand abreast, and faded
away like a charge of fairy Norsemen. I looked
round: there stood the machines, solemn in the
twilight, hooded-like sibyls, mysterious as the
Pythonesses or the Fates, looking like the
gigantic ghosts of the Titan bathing-women of
the earlier ages.

"Do you want a machine to-morrow?" said a
voice.

It was the disgusting voice of materialism and
common sense, whose brutal foot (excuse the
transition of metaphor) will trample on the fairest
spots, and dissolve the spell of all the enchant-
ments of the strongest imagination.

"No," said I, with all the severity, but less
of the truth than the occasion demanded.

I write at a window, so you must pardon sidenotes
of digression. A moving tulip bed, or
rather a similar bed of parasols, is floating by to
take an airing. It is just meridian— ought I not
to say so many bells? That night, sleep wrestled
with, and threw me at an early hour. With the
crescendo of the surge in my ears I went to
bed (0 divine snowiness of country beds!), de-
siring to be called at half-past six for bathing;
the consequence of which, of course, was, that
I woke at six, and lay grumbling till a quarter
to seven, when a voice dropped my boots with a
double clump at the door. Getting up for a first
bath is, to a nervous, imaginative man, like
Twitter, the epic poet, a dreadful thing.

Podgers, the cheesemonger in Fetter-lane,
has just passed with his six children, who all
seem to have been born on the same day. Query:
Can you call six children twins? ought not three
to be called twins, and so on? Podgers wears
a high, brown, flower-pot hat, and? of course,
black trousers. His crafty hole-and-corner
face jars on the broad, frank, impatient sea.
N.B. He has brought his day-book down to
amuse himself with to-morrow (Sunday) while
the Sextines are gone in procession to church,
each with a large Common Prayer Book folded
in a clean white handkerchief.

To return: I got up, trying to think it was very
delicious, which it wasn't. I roped on my necktie,