It is a perfectly safe beach for children, for though the channel is very near and the big English boats pass close to the shore, there are several sand banks which make the beach quite safe, and from seven in the morning till seven at night there are two boats au large and two men on the beach, with ropes, life-preservers, and horns which they blow whenever they think the bathers are too far out.  There is an “Inspecteur de la Plage,” a regular French official with a gold band on his cap, who is a most important and amiable gentleman and sees that no one is annoyed in any way.  We made friends with him at once, moyennant une piece de dix francs, and he looked after us, saw that our tents were put up close to the water, no others near, and warned off stray children and dogs who were attracted by our children’s toys and cakes.

The plage is a pretty sight on a bright day.  There are hundreds of tents—­all bright-coloured.  When one approaches Boulogne from the sea the beach looks like a parterre of flowers.  Near the Casino there are a quantity of old-fashioned ramshackly bathing cabins on wheels, with very small boys cracking their whips and galloping up and down, from the digue to the edge of the water, on staid old horses who know their work perfectly—­put themselves at once into the shafts of the carriages—­never go beyond a certain limit in the sea.

All the bathers are prudent.  It is rare to see any one swimming out or diving from a boat.  A policeman presides at the public bathing place and there are three or four baigneurs and baigneuses who take charge of the timid bathers; one wonderful old woman, bare-legged, of course, a handkerchief on her head, a flannel blouse and a very short skirt made of some water-proof material that stood out stiff all around her and shed the water—­she was the premiere baigneuse—­seventy years old and had been baigneuse at Boulogne for fifty-one years.  She had bathed C. as a child, and was delighted to see her again and wildly interested in her two children.

There were donkeys, of course, and goats.  The children knew the goat man well and all ran to him with their mugs as soon as they heard his peculiar whistle.  They held their mugs close under the goat so that they got their milk warm and foaming, as it was milked directly into their mugs.  The goats were quite tame—­one came always straight to our tents and lay down there till his master came.  Every one wanted to feed them with cakes and bits of sugar, but he would never let them have anything for fear it should spoil their milk.

Another friend was the cake man, dressed all in white, with his basket of brioches and madeleines on his head—­then there were the inevitable Africans with fezes on their heads and bundles of silks—­crepes-de-chine and ostrich feathers, that one sees at every plage.  I don’t think they did much business.