magnetism is sure (do what you may) to lead you there-seems that night to you more sublime and awful than ever: its waves, ten thousand abreast, roll in with a long moaning wash of foam, race up to your feet, and then rush back again into the deep. Far as you can see them, they roll in and roll out, with a hopeless violence and a despairing rage. You are poetizing, perhaps, as you listen, untired, to the plunging roar of the breakers along the shore, when a voice through the twilight says—

'Shall you want a bathing machine to-morrow morning, sir?'

There is a charm in the first night at the sea-side even in the bald, dreary lodging-house drawing-room, whose loose carpet the sea air, through the open window, every moment flaps up. There is a charm even in the portrait of the landlady's first husband, in sable profile, that flutters on the wall. There is a charm ineffable even in the shrimps for tea, and in the distant moan of the sea, that at a distance sounds not unlike the roar of Piccadilly heard from some quiet nook in Hyde Park.

The first bath the morning after arrival at a sea-side place is espe

cially delightful. You dress rudely, and ramble out, half sulky, half pleased.

However early it is, the sun, that indefatigable early riser, seems to have been up hours before. The gulls are blowing about like white blossoms over the sea; high up over the barley fields on the chalk cliffs the larks are singing their morning hymn (old version) in their gleesome, untiring way. The sea is half golden, half laughing, glittering green, and in the far distance it stretches away in a band of sapphire.

The hooded boxes, called bathing machines, are already on the move. Three are wallowing out at sea, and their inmates I can see bobbing and splashing and striking out five hundred yards away. Two more have amphibious horses harnessed to them, and are being driven out seaward. The others are still high and dry, the fine sand half way up their wheels, their drivers talking together, as they sit on the steps counting out bathing towels.

You select your machine, you run up the steps. Lock the door close. The horse is put, and you hear the chains of his harness jingle, and the shout as the driver mounts to his seat. Presently the machine lifts, and jolts, and topples on-a splash -the wheels are in the water, and now the waves lap and flap against the steps. The horse is unhooked, and tramples backwards past the window. There is a silence-you are alone out at sea, and the waves race and leap up under the hood, as if longing to get at you.

I

I hang up my clothes on nails. tread shiveringly over the sodden carpet and the gritty floor. I undo the door, and look out under the cavern roof of the hood. What a mere little plummet of flesh I seem to be, to be let down by that briny rope into the green fathoms of that vast and seething sea! I descend like a frightened diver. That moment a breaker tears in under the hood, and licks me off the steps. It treats me as it would treat a fisherman's float on a yard of sea-weed, or the wreck of a man-of-war, or anything great or small that is at its mercy. I battle with that dread shapeless monster,

and fight my way out beyond the hood. There are the cliffs, white in the sunlight, and out seaward the horizon stretches in a line of trembling silver. I still, when the breaker passes, feel the sand soft under my feet-soft pillow for many a poor dead seaman's head, soft rest for dead seaman's buried gold and treasure. I wade out towards the wave I see spreading along towards me. It buffets me-it tramples on meits froth pours over me in a wash as of lather. Suddenly I feel the blood rush to my heart-I am out of my depth, and I cannot swim. What if

I am carried out to sea! I strike homeward, and feel I am getting nearer and nearer. Hurrah!-I catch at the hood of the machine, and am landed.

Half an hour later I am at the open window of a house in the Marine Parade, in a pleasant glow from bathing, and at breakfast. The damp sheet of the Times' (half an acre of news) lies before me. I am shelling shrimps, and sipping my tea. Every now and then I take a look out of window. I am supremely happy: I feel I have earned my breakfast.

Now, a stripling in a straw-hat and blue riband, with a telescope under his dexter arm, paces by on his way to the pier, and a pretty sister in a round hat with him; or some children come by with dank hair, fresh from bathing; or the two old maids next door come in from their morning walk; or Captain Spicer shouts up to me to know if I would like a stroll when I have done grubbing,' as he rather roughly calls it; and in the distance beyond, where the signal-flag flows crimson, I see boats, and white and orange sails, diminishing in the distance, till they become mere gray specks.

After breakfast you can go knocking about the red and white balls on the green cloth of the billiard-table at the other end of the Parade; or, after a walk along the cliffs inland, go and practise archery at those helpless stuffed soldiers on the beach; or go and take a chair, and get a book, and read and stare at the sea alternately. But the walk on the cliff is best; for there the wild flowers nod in the chalk clefts, and

6

you can lie in the clover fields, and fall asleep in lazy beatitude as the lark rises singing over your head, its innocent music incorporating itself deliciously with your dream.

Or you can call on Mrs. Fitz Jones, and offer to take the young ladies out for a sail. Mrs. F. J. accepts your polite offer with readiness. The girls' appear in charming hats, with little black cockades just in front of them, and parasols that resemble large tulips. They have tried to make themselves ugly with blue 'uglies,' but they have totally failed.

We are going out as far as the Galloper Sand. The wind catches the sail, and strains it tight. We trip and skim over the sea, and the eldest Miss Fitz Jones-Miss Dora Fitz Jones-volunteers a song about "Tis twilight on the wave, dear,' which the boatman seems to be enraptured at; and so am I, only that it blows rather fresh, and I am not much accustomed to a leaping sea, and the water comes in our boat just a little. We drive so fast, that the boat quite dips down on the one side, as if it was trying to drown itself, which makes me nervous; and the Misses Fitz Jones cling together like the brides of Venice; and all the way home (with no wind and dead rowing) the waterman entertains us with smuggling stories, and salvage stories, that extort interjections from the Misses Fitz-Jones.

Now there is an unshipping of oars, a furling of sails, as we skim along the mossy angle of the pier,

and are home again. I hear the ring of the shipwrights' hammers-we drive in among the fleet of boats.

Socially, Dippington-for it is Dippington I have been all the time surreptitiously sketching is not lively. There is the eternal raffle, with the prizes more disappointing than the blanks; the reading room, with every work but the one you want; but, after all, the sea, and not the land, is what we come to Dippington for.

It is our duty to sit on the sands, and, like so many sham King Canutes, to watch the waves roll in and out.

It is the worthy citizens in the dégagé dress, the extraordinary straw hats, and the buff slippers we come to study; it is the good-natured wives who collect shells and seaweed; the children who build sandcastles, and dig little puddle graves for soft little crabs, whose honest pleasure we come to share in.

And long may the Seasidina attacks continue to prevail in August with their usual virulence, if they give to tried, brain-wearied people a few weeks of pure air and repose -of rest from the grinding roar of London-of rest from money-grubbing and rushing to and fro-from feverish desk-work' and mill-horse rotation in Rotten Row; and all we wish is to meet some of the readers of this article a week or two hence on Ryde Pier, or on the Castle Hill at Scarborough, or on the beach at Dippington, enjoying their change of air.'

HERE was quite an excitement and an air of something being about to happen in the usually stagnant town of Clayton. There were groups of two, three, and four standing about in the generally deserted street. Mr. Slangroom, solicitor No. 1, who lived in a large house standing in its own secluded and rather damp grounds, on this especial afternoon stopped to shake hands with the daughters of solicitor No. 2 (who had to struggle hard to keep the roof of a modest small red brick tenement over his head) instead of passing with his customary crushingly condescending bow. In the open square in the middle of the town, around whose edge all the 'best houses' stood, the chief members of the female population were disporting themselves airily in summer garments of the latest fashion from London. The wife of the inspecting commander of the coast-guard district, the slightly faded but remarkably elegant Mrs. Jackson herself, whose claims to superiority would have been undoubted had it not been for the difficulty she occasionally laboured under about the correct distribution of her H's-this lady, who would have loved to rule the whole town as she ruled the small naval hero her husband, who was in his turn a terror to the neighbourhood, through his peculiar method of driving the two 'regulation horses' government allowed him-this lady, I repeat, on this day of marvels, was seen to give her hand in a cordial and friendly manner to Mrs. Jones, the wife of the lieutenant of the station, whom, up to this auspicious day, she had always (at all events in public) kept at a distance. The surgeon's wife, whose father had been a gentleman farmer, forgot to flout the rival surgeon's wife, who had come a stranger to the place, and who had been unable to state

precisely what her father had been. Every one seemed eager, anxiously happy, and slightly bewildered; and what it was all about shall now be told.

Just inside the turnpike gate which gave admittance to the town on the east, stood enclosed by high brick walls and secured from intrusion by massive doors, bolted, barred, and bound with iron, a large, square, substantial mansion. This was the rectory; and for many years the rectory had kept watch and frowning ward over that portion of the town, empty and deserted; for the shepherd of the flock at Clayton had been on the Continent for twelve years, and no curate was permitted to occupy his house.

The Rev. Thomas Pierson, some thirty years before the time my story opens, had been a rich young clergy

man.

The living of Clayton was in his family, so he came to the income it brought him without incumbrances of any kind. He had an established place amongst the magnates of the county in right of his profession, position, social qualities, and wealth. And soon the tie became stronger; for he married Miss Marchmont, the daughter of the oldest, poorest, and proudest baronet in the county.

For some years all had gone merry as a marriage bell with the Rev. Thomas and his aristocratic bride. The lady was seen on Sundays by her husband's admiring congregation stepping daintily out of her carriage and along the aisle to her curtained pew; and occasionally, if any one was ill, and did not live in too small an alley for her ponychaise to convey her to the door, she would drive up, and leave for the sufferer a basket of beautifullyarranged fruit and flowers. was all that was known about her, and no one can affect to consider it aught but good as far as it goes.

This

In the course of years, four daughters stepped along with her up the aisle-religious little ladies, thought the people, for the youthful damsels looked not either to the right or left. But when the two eldest of these young ladies were grown up, and got invited to the houses of some of their father's parishioners, and would not go; and when the surgeons, and solicitors, and wealthy merchants of Clayton found that their daughters did not get invited in their turn to participate in the many festivities that were going on at the rectory, the whole Pierson family were pronounced 'abominably proud,' and disliked with a heartiness that only people bent on pursuing the even tenour of their way, regardless of the attempts of others to thrust intimacies upon them, can experience. This being the state of affairs at Clayton, small sympathy was felt or expressed by the inhabitants thereof when one fine day the fact cropped out of the Rev. Thomas Pierson having got into such difficulties that a lengthened residence abroad would alone set him straight with the world again. He wrought, to be sure, a little on the hearts of his female auditors by the touching allusion he made in his farewell sermon to those sons of mammon and unrighteousness who were distressing him and those innocent ones who were dependent on him.' Two or three ladies resolved to call at the rectory in a day or two, and attempt to see and console Mrs. Pierson (she was a Marchmont after all) in her sorrow. In these days of her humility she might come down from her high estate and be friendly with them, and then they could speak of her afterwards to their friends as ' dear Mrs. Pierson,' and say, 'how they missed her.' But this was not to be. The following day Clayton was shaken to the centre of its being by a travelling carriage and four dashing out of the rectory grounds, containing Mrs. Pierson and three of her daughters, and laden with trunks. Later in the day, a fly from the principal inn conveyed away the rector and the fourth Miss Pierson; and in the evening the most distinguished in

habitants of the town received notes of farewell, with the Pierson crest on the paper and envelopes. And then no more was heard about them in Clayton for twelve years. But now a rumour, which had been vague and undefined at first, had gathered form and substance, and the report that the Piersons were coming home again' was an authentic one; more than this, their return was not a thing of the far-off future, they were coming home to-night. Even as one made this announcement to the other as they met and conversed in the open square it became an accomplished fact; carriages full of ladies and luggage passed them on their way from the recently-erected railway station to the rectory; and, peering anxiously into the last of these, the gratified inhabitants of Clayton had the pleasure of seeing the head of their revered rector rising above surging waves of crinoline.

The Piersons had been absent for twelve years, pursuing their plan of retrenchment; and how had it answered? It was difficult to discover, so difficult that it baffled the curiosity of Clayton entirely. The 'county,' their own set,' might know, but the town' remained, to its sorrow, in ignorance. The ladies of the place made friendly calls as soon as they could reasonably suppose the Piersons had had time to shake into something like order, but they met with a strictly parochial reception, and found out nothing save that the rectory drawing-room was furnished almost exclusively with what looked like the young ladies' handiwork. The table-cloths had painted velvet borders, the chairs, sofas, curtain borders, were all of wool work; and 'all this,' said Mrs. Jackson, the naval commander's wife, who had lived in a garrison in her early days, and been accustomed to see old boxes appear to the uninitiated as elegant ottomans through a little sleight-ofhand, 'all this looked like making the best of nothing.' One thing seemed certain-if the Piersons were just as poor as when they left, they were not one whit less proud.

The eldest Miss Pierson's reputa