; and one saw there lithe and active
frames, either careering gracefully along in the old style of swimming,
or adopting the new and scientific method which causes the human form
divine to approach very nearly to the resemblance of a rather excited
grampus.

But inexorable Time warns the youthful bathers that they must sacrifice
to the Graces; and some amusing incidents occur during the process.
Generally speaking, though the amount of attire is not excessive,
considerable effort in the way of pinning and hitching is required to
get things in their proper places. A young gentleman was reduced to
inexpressible grief, and held up to the scorn of his fellow-bathers, by
the fact that, in the course of his al fresco toilette, one of his feet
went through his inexpressibles in an honourable quarter, instead of
proceeding by the proper route; the error interested his friends
vastly--for they are as critical as the most fastidious could be of any
singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his
embarrassing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he
was rescued from his ignoble position by some grown-up friend. Then,
the young East is prone to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume,
before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those
conditions is a trial even to the experienced. Some, pale from their
long immersion--for theirs was no transient dip--grew paler still after
they had discussed the pipe or cigar demanded of them by rigorous
custom. Fashion reigns supreme among the gamins of the East as well as
among the ladies of the West. Off they went, however, cleaner and
fresher than before--tacitly endorsing by their matutinal amusement the
motto that has come down from the philosopher of old, and even now
reigns supreme from Bermondsey to Belgravia, that "water is a most
excellent thing."

The day may arrive perhaps when, having embanked the Thames, we shall
follow suit to the Seine and the Rhine, by tenanting it with cheap baths
for the many. Until we do so, the stale joke of the "Great Unwashed"
recoils upon ourselves, and is no less symptomatic of defective sanitary
arrangements than the possibility of a drought in Bermondsey. But we are
forgetting our bathers. They have gone, leaving the place to
solitude--some, I hope, home to breakfast, others out among the
flower-walks or on the greensward. It is a gloomy, overcast, muggy,
unseasonable July morning; and the civi