It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a very public appearance.  This promiscuous bathing was not much in excess of the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct.  Here and there a gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand.  But otherwise all was a damp and dreary decorum.  I challenged my philosopher in vain for a specific cause of his dislike of the scene.

Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the sea-bathing.  A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over them.  There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who seemed getting the most of the good that was going.

VI.

But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating the good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, I have since thought of it as rather melancholy.  It was in fact no wiser or livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it afforded.  The best thing about it was that it left the guests very much to their own devices.  The established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-looking; but one could eschew them.  The more of them one eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day’s rest is more than most people can bear.  They endure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after a twenty-mile run on the wheel.  The road, by-the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driver professed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of his profession.

SAWDUST IN THE ARENA

It was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona that the circus events I wish to speak of took place; in fact, I had the honor and profit of seeing two circuses there.  Or, strictly speaking, it was one entire circus that I saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying glory of a circus on its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb in adversity.

I.