You cannot walk six miles anywhere along the south coast without coming upon one of these heaps of people, called a watering-place.  There will be a town of houses behind wherein the people lodge, until, as they think, they have stayed a sufficient time at the sea, and they return, hot, cross, and mystified, to London.  The sea front will be bricked or paved for a mile or so, and there will be rows of boats and bathing-machines, and other contrivances to screen off the view of the sea.  And, as we have indicated, watering-places and staying by the seaside are incompatible things.  The true stayer by the seaside goes into the watering-place because he must; because there is little food, and that uncooked, and no tobacco, between the cliffs and the sea.  Having purchased what he needs he flees forth again.  What time the whole selvage of England becomes watering-place, there will be no more staying by the seaside at all in the land.  But this is a gloomy train of thought that we will not pursue.

There have been those who assert that one end of staying at the seaside is bathing; but it is easy to show that this is not so.  Your proper bathing-place is up the river, where the trees bend to the green and brown shadows of the water.  There the bath is sweet, fresh out of the sky, or but just filtered through the blue hills of the distant water-shed; and it is set about with flowers.  But the sea—­the sea has stood there since the beginning of things, and with small prospect of change, says Mr. Kipling, to all eternity.  The water in the sea, geologists tell us, has not been changed for fifty million years!  The same chemist who sets me against all my food with his chemical names speaks of the sea as a weak solution of drowned men.  Be that as it may, it leaves the skin harsh with salt, and the hair sticky.  Moreover, it is such a promiscuous bathing-place.  However, we need scarcely depreciate the sea as a bath, for what need is there of that when the river is clearly better?  No one can deny that the river is better.  People who bathe in the sea bathe by mistake, because they have come to the side of the sea, and know not how else to use it.

So, too, with the boating.  It is hard to imagine how human beings who have drifted down streams, and watched the brown fish in the shallows, and peered through the tall sedges at the forget-me-nots, and fought with the ropes of the water-lilies, and heard the ripple under the bows, can ever think of going to and fro, pitching spasmodically, in front of a watering-place.  And as for fishing—­they catch fish at sea, indeed, but it is not fishing at all; neither rods nor flies have they, and there is an end to that matter.