raph
frames in plush and gelatine, or to select more perishable trophies in
glass and china, all solemnly guaranteed to be worth double the price.

At the photographer's, a few yards farther along, a visitor can have his
portrait taken a yard square, the size of a postage stamp, or on a
postcard to send to his friends. Ingenious backgrounds are on hand,
representing appropriate seaside scenes in which the sitter has nothing
to do but to press his face against a hole on the canvas, and these are
extensively patronised, for what can be more convenient than to stand on
solid earth, attired in sober, everyday clothing, yet be portrayed
splashing in the waves in the spandiest of French bathing costumes,
riding a donkey along the sands, or manfully hauling down the sails of a
yacht!

Mr Photographer Sykes is a man of resource, and deserves the prosperity
which is the envy of his neighbours. Mrs Sykes wears silk linings to
her skirts on Sundays, and rustles like the highest in the land. She
had three new hats in one summer, and the fishmonger's wife knows for a
fact that not one of the number costs less than "twenty-five-six."

The High Street and the esplanade constitute the new Norton-on-Sea which
has sprung into being within the last ten years, but the real, original,
aristocratic Norton lies a couple of miles inland, and consists of a
wide, sloping street, lined with alternate shops and houses, branching
off from which are a number of sleepy roads, in which detached and semi-
detached villas hide themselves behind trees and hedges, and barricade
their windows with stiff, white curtains. The one great longing
actuating the Norton householder seems to be to see nothing, and to be
seen by none. "Is the house overlooked?" they ask the agent anxiously
on the occasion of the first application. "Does it overlook any other
house?"

"There _is_ another house across the road, madam!" the agent is
sometimes regretfully obliged to admit, "but it has been very cleverly
planted out."

So it has! by means of a fir or an elm planted within a few yards of the
windows, and blocking out something more important than another villa,
but the Norton resident desires privacy above all things. The sun and
the air have to creep in as best they may.

The more aristocratic the position of a family, the more secluded
becomes their position. Fences are raised by an arrangement of lattice-
work on the top of boards; shrubs are planted thi