I gave the signal for being restored to land.
The horse is put to.

"Right!" cries a voice, and a jerk nearly sends
me off my legs. I leap down into the soft ankle-
deep sand, am wished " good morning" by the
'' two noble kinsmen," and depart to punish my
breakfast; my chest expanded, my heart larger,
my eyes brighter, my moral nature improved,
my physical nature padded arid developed.

NIGHT AT DIPPINGTON.

Night at Dippington is "mighty pretty to
behold," as Pepys would have said. You can see
the red light on the pier casting a quivering
column of liquid ruby, like so much burning
sea, below it in the harbour. Far away in the
distance, starlike over the waters, twinkles the
North Foreland light, answered right and
left by corresponding guardians of the coast.
Through the dusk you hear from your open
window the buzz of a beetle, telling by association
of the thundery warmth of the summer
night, and of the hush that must be away there
in the fields that lead down to the cliff, in the
dense, dark clumps of elms, and in the feathering
ashes. The ships' bells tell the hour with
their monotonous but clear and decisive cling-clang,
in the harbour where they are moored
near the red light, and everywhere— whether in
the high streets, between the rows of lamps by
the market-place where the fisherboys stand, or
in the sea-side billiard-room, or on the cliffs by
the white lighthouse, or by the platform (as like
a quarter-deck as possible) where the coastguard
man in white trousers, and the eternal
battered telescope under his arm, paces— you
hear the roll, and surge, and lash, and chafe,
and splashing drag, and tumble of the breakers,
that spread white through the night. Now,
one by one, on Terrace, and Parade, and
Esplanade, and Side-street, and Cliff-crescent, the
pleasure-seekers put out their lamps, and as they
close like so many closing eyes, I turn in, and
put out mine likewise.

MORNING AT DIPPINGTON.

One hour ago, by this repeater, and I was up
to my chin in the green sparkling waves, feeling
a little anxious as the sand seemed suddenly to
recede from the extended half of the great toe
on my left foot, and I looked back, and I saw I
was fifty yards from No. 68 machine, and
seemed bearing out every moment imperceptibly
a little further from the white cliffs, and the
man who, shining white through the waves, is
floating on his back, calmly, some twenty feet
off. Now, I am here, calm as Cato, at my tea
and prawns, divesting those mollusca of their
pink armour, and looking out delighted at the
diamond sparkle of the morning sea, the mile-long
bars of purple cloud shadows, and the
broad green field of opaque emerald, the long
dim blue line of land, that seems but consolidated
cloud, yesterday cloud turned solid, yet
barely solid. It is a sight to make an old man
young again. The line of foam that breaks
along the shore glitters like quicksilver; a
dancing diamond twinkle and restless glimmer
is on the sea; and the brown sands, where the
sea washes, are transparent and luminous as if
they were covered with a thin glazing of ice.
Children laugh on the balconies and on the
terraces— they hop up and down in the water like
so many chickens round the old mother hen of
the machine. Bathing-women, witch-like and
hideous, in sodden blue flannel bathing-gowns,
float about like stale mermaids or water ogresses
seeking their prey. The sands are like one
immense laundress's drying-ground, with strings
of coloured bathing-dresses, towels, aud other
apparatus of sanitary ablutions. The machines
in the water remind one of a French village
during the inundations; those on shore, of
the first encampment of a fair. The
machines echo with screams and laughter. The
proprietor of the bathing-machines, a lame man,
who swims like a frog, walks about the sands
with a contemplative, benevolent air, with his
hands behind him. There are ships in the
distance at all degrees of obscurity, from the palpable
black boat that seems made of sticking-plaister
like the profile likenesses, to that brig out there,
grey and dim as the Flying Dutchman. Truly,
Dippington, of a bright morning, when the very
air laughs, is a pleasant and cheering place.
A little time and it will be a desolate Sahara
of fishermen, moping lodging-house keepers
complaining of taxes: no children, no laughing, no
nothing. The wooden spades will gather dust at
the shop door— the buff slippers hang purposeless in the window.

CHARACTERS AT DIPPINGTON.

I am just home from a burning walk along
the top of the chalk cliff, where the pink valerian
bushes over into the blue air, over some giddy
eighty feet, and where the wild geranium lures
the bees into its veined honey-cups, and where
the wild mignionette spires up, crisp and
perfumeless. Here I have been lying down on the
scorched, half-burnt-up wild barley, by the side
of the chalky path, where the wheat shoulders
and billows, I especially enjoy the quiet cliff walks
outside Dippington, where the park palings, as
you pass, wake into a hot stinging buzz of flies,
and where the great orange and black bumblebee,
bullying robber of the summer flowers,
rifles the poppy that lies hid among the guardian
spears of the wheat-field—a second Jason seeking
his Medea. Am I to be called an idler
because I lie down on my rough bed of
half-burnt-up white clover, and listen to the lark
rising, through vistas of blue, to the inner
heaven where the angels call him?

"There ain't no thoroughfare this way, leastways
there is no public road, but if you like to
climb up, as I'm going off duty, and will come
up through this gallery cliff, you're welcome."
So said a coast-guard to me, as I find myself
blocked up at a corner cf the sands, and want
to get back to Dippiugton.

I accept his proposal, and follow the
sunburnt Neptune up a dark gallery cut in the chalk,
with loopholes here and there, letting in the
clear daylight.