my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

WHAT MAKES A HOLIDAY?

What is it makes a holiday? Some people want Paris, some Monte Carlo,
one man cannot be satisfied without big game to hunt, another must
have a grouse moor. The student has his sailing boat, the young
wage-earner his bicycle, three girl friends look forward to their week
in a Hastings boarding-house. Almost anything may be "a change"; most
things, to someone or other, are "a holiday." What does it all mean?

The sands of West Sussex are wide and free, firm and smooth for
walking with bare feet, lovely with little shells and sea-worm curves
and ripple marks and the pits of razor-shells. Above them are the
slopes of shingle, gleaming with all colours in the September sun.
Farther up again, the low, brown crumbling cliffs crowned with green
wreaths of tamarisk. The sea comes creeping up, or else the wind
raises great white breakers; if the waves are quiet, old breakwaters,
long ago broken themselves, smashed fragments here and there of
concrete protections put by man, gaps in the cliff and changes in the
coast-line, remind us of the vast force behind the gentle and
persistent lap of water. The beach itself reminds us of it; there a
flint and here a rounded pebble made out of brick or glass, worn down
from man's rubbish to sea's proof of power.

Over it all are the children, brown-legged and bare-headed. (Is it
something in the weather this year that has given us the particular
red-brown, suggestive of shrimp and lobster, that is the
colour-vintage of 1913?) Babies with oilskin waders, bathers, girls in
vividly coloured coats walking along the sands; all make up the
picture and give us once again the thrill of holiday.

Inland, the Sussex lanes are green and the trees are broad and shady.
Thatched cottages are everywhere, and barns with heavy brows;
yesterday I saw some pots put for shelter from the sun under the
far-projecting thatch of a farmhouse. The gardens are full of
sun-flowers and hollyhocks, fuchsia and golden rod; the walls are
covered with jasmine and passion-flowers. Old, old churches make us
feel like day-flies. The yew in the churchyard five minutes' walk from
here is said to be 900 years old; the church itself is thirteenth
century, but into its walls were built fragments of a former church,
f