At luncheon one day a very fat, strong boy makes his appearance, and is supplied with soup.  All his neighbours who have no soup are wild with envy, though they are well acquainted with that soup at dinner, and know that it is bad.  ‘What is the meaning of it?  Why this favouritism?’ we inquire of the waiter furiously.  ’Well, you see, sir, he is better now; but that is the invalid.’  The delicate, attractive creature we have pictured to ourselves with pains in her limbs turns out, after all, to be a hulking schoolboy, probably bilious from over-eating.  The public indignation is excessive, while the subject of it, quite unconscious of the fact, has another plate of soup.

The wild weather out of doors is not, of course, confined to the land, and the sea would be a fine sight if it was not invisible.  The waves, indeed, are so high that the fishing-boats which have remained out all night are often warned off, or, as it is locally termed, ‘burned off,’ from the harbour bar.  A tar barrel is lighted for this purpose on the headland, and it is the only thing which the eternal rain cannot utterly squelch and extinguish.  Occasionally we venture down upon the pier to see the boats make the harbour, which, not a little to our disappointment, they never fail to do.  There are huge buttresses of stone against the pier-head, behind which the new comer imagines he may crouch in perfect safety, till the third wave comes in and convinces him to the contrary.  No one ever dreams of ‘burning’ him off—­giving him one word of warning of that unpleasant contingency; for to behold a fellow creature more drenched and dripping than ourselves is very soothing.  As to the dangers of maritime life, we are all agreed that they are greatly overrated; and some sceptics even go so far as to suggest that the skeleton ship, half embedded in the sands, which so impresses visitors in fine weather, is not a genuine wreck at all, but has been placed there by the Town Corporation to delude the public.

Now and then we splash down to the quay to see a few million of herrings sold at four shillings a hundred, which will presently induce philanthropic fishmongers in London to advertise ‘a glut this morning,’ and to retail them at threepence apiece.  At rare intervals we explore the dripping town.  It is amazing what a fascination the small picture-shops, to which at home we should never give a glance, afford us; even the frontispieces to popular music have unwonted attractions; while the pottery-shops, full of ware made from clay ’peculiar to the locality,’ are only too seductive to our wives, who purchase largely what they believe to be great bargains, till they find on their return home the identical articles in Oxford Street, at half the price.  In London we never visit the British Museum itself, unless to escort some country cousin, but at Barecliff-on-Sea, in wet weather, the miserable little local Institute, with its specimens of strata, its calf with two heads in spirits, and