Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the result of a life too confined and artificial in close dirty overcrowded cities.  It is to satisfy this craving that towns have sprung up everywhere on our coasts and extended their ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their tens of thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the ocean.  That is to say, during their indoor hours; at other times they walk or sit or lie as close as they can to it, following the water as it ebbs and reluctantly retiring before it when it returns.  It was not so formerly, before the discovery was made that the sea could cure us.  Probably our great-grandfathers didn’t even know they were sick; at all events, those who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were satisfied to be a little distance from it, out of sight of its grey desolation and, if possible, out of hearing of its “accents disconsolate.”  This may be seen anywhere on our coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the towns and villages are almost always some distance from the sea, often in a hollow or at all events screened by rising ground and woods from it.  The modern seaside place has, in most cases, its old town or village not far away but quite as near as the healthy ancients wished to be.

The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern town was discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it might have been two hundred, so great was the change to its sheltered atmosphere.  Loitering in its quiet streets among the old picturesque brick houses with tiled or thatched roofs and tall chimneys—­ivy and rose and creeper-covered, with a background of old oaks and elms—­I had the sensation of having come back to my own home.  In that still air you could hear men and women talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry or laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and martins, and the “lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.”  It was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more.  Rut there were compensations.

The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late summer visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste so much precious time shut up in apartments, and at every appearance of a slight improvement in the weather they would pour out of the houses and the green slope would be covered with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying down to the beach.  The crowd was composed mostly of women—­about three to every man, I should say—­and their children; and it was one of the most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of the large number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type, which chance had brought together at that spot.  It