You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day.  Nothing in the world is more uninteresting than eleven o’clock.  It is the hour of mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o’clock on a shingly beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing.  Twelve has a dignity always, and everywhere its name is great.  The noon of every day that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly.  One o’clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hour of the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening and lingering life.  To bathe at eleven in the sun, in the wind, to bathe from a machine, in a narrow sea that is certainly not clear and is only by courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience to a tyrannical tide and in water that is always much colder than yourself, to bathe in a hurry and in public—­this is to know nothing rightly of one of the greatest of all the pleasures that humanity takes with nature.

By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea than of mere straits.  These temperate islands would be better called the Ocean Islands.  When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, he composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter of some thought.  The final decision was to direct it, “A Victor Hugo, Ocean.”  It reached him.  It even received a reply:  “I am the Past, you are the Future; I am, etc.”  If an English boy had had the same idea the name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it.  “A Victor Hugo, La Manche,” would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but “the Channel” would have had no respect at all.  Indeed, this last is suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland—­formless grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by a perpetual wind.

As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea, machine-bathing at eleven o’clock will hardly furnish them with a magical early memory.  Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails.  It was vulgarized for them and made violent.  A bathing woman, type of all ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and superfluous saltness of tears.  “Too much of water had they,” poor infants.

None the less is the barren shore the children’s; and St. Augustine, Isaac Newton, and Wordsworth had not a vision of sea-beaches without a child there.

THE BOY

After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood of few explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phase which the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note as an impression.