er over an oblong space of a
mile long by twenty yards wide. Only three miles away there was a
towering white cliff overhanging a practically desert beach; and one
seagull circled above one solitary, motionless, supine man, really
staying at the seaside.

You cannot walk six miles anywhere along the south coast without coming
upon one of these heaps of people, called a watering-place. There will
be a town of houses behind wherein the people lodge, until, as they
think, they have stayed a sufficient time at the sea, and they return,
hot, cross, and mystified, to London. The sea front will be bricked or
paved for a mile or so, and there will be rows of boats and
bathing-machines, and other contrivances to screen off the view of the
sea. And, as we have indicated, watering-places and staying by the
seaside are incompatible things. The true stayer by the seaside goes
into the watering-place because he must; because there is little food,
and that uncooked, and no tobacco, between the cliffs and the sea.
Having purchased what he needs he flees forth again. What time the whole
selvage of England becomes watering-place, there will be no more staying
by the seaside at all in the land. But this is a gloomy train of thought
that we will not pursue.

There have been those who assert that one end of staying at the seaside
is bathing; but it is easy to show that this is not so. Your proper
bathing-place is up the river, where the trees bend to the green and
brown shadows of the water. There the bath is sweet, fresh out of the
sky, or but just filtered through the blue hills of the distant
water-shed; and it is set about with flowers. But the sea--the sea has
stood there since the beginning of things, and with small prospect of
change, says Mr. Kipling, to all eternity. The water in the sea,
geologists tell us, has _not been changed for fifty million years_! The
same chemist who sets me against all my food with his chemical names
speaks of the sea as a weak solution of drowned men. Be that as it may,
it leaves the skin harsh with salt, and the hair sticky. Moreover, it is
such a promiscuous bathing-place. However, we need scarcely depreciate
the sea as a bath, for what need is there of that when the river is
clearly better? No one can deny that the river is better. People who
bathe in the sea bathe by mistake, because they have come to the side of
the sea, and know not how else to use it.

So, too, with the boating. It is hard to i