But I imagine myself away from bands and piers; for a band by a moonlit sea calls you to be very grown-up, and the beach and the crabs —­such as are left—­call you to be a child; and between the two you can very easily be miserable.  I can see myself with a spade and bucket being extraordinarily happy.  The other day I met a lucky little boy who had a pile of sand in his garden to play with, and I was fortunate enough to get an order for a tunnel.  The tunnel which I constructed for him was a good one, but not so good that I couldn’t see myself building a better one with practice.  I came away with an ambition for architecture.  If ever I go to the sea again I shall build a proper tunnel; and afterwards—­ well, we shall see.  At the moment I feel in tremendous form.  I feel that I could do a cathedral.

There is one joy of childhood, however, which one can never recapture, and that is the joy of getting wet in the sea.  There is a statue not so far from Fleet Street of the man who introduced Sunday schools into England, but the man whom boys and girls would really like to commemorate in lasting stone is the doctor who first said that salt water couldn’t give you a cold.  Whether this was true or not I do not know, but it was a splendid and never-failing retort to anxious grown-ups, and added much to the joys of the seaside.  But it is a joy no longer possible to one who is his own master.  I, for instance, can get my feet wet in fresh water if I like; to get them wet in salt water is no special privilege.

Feeling as I do, writing as I have written, it is sad for me to know that if I really went to the sea this August it would not be with a spade and a bucket but with a bag of golf clubs; that even my evenings would be spent, not on the beach, but on a bicycle riding to the nearest town for a paper.  Yet it is useless for you to say that I do not love the sea with my old love, that I am no longer pleased with the old childish things.  I shall maintain that it is the sea which is not what it was, and that I am very happy in Fleet Street thinking of it as it used to be.

Golden Fruit

Of the fruits of the year I give my vote to the orange.  In the first place it is a perennial—­if not in actual fact, at least in the greengrocer’s shop.  On the days when dessert is a name given to a handful of chocolates and a little preserved ginger, when mac‚doine de fruits is the title bestowed on two prunes and a piece of rhubarb, then the orange, however sour, comes nobly to the rescue; and on those other days of plenty when cherries and strawberries and raspberries and gooseberries riot together upon the table, the orange, sweeter than ever, is still there to hold its own.  Bread and butter, beef and mutton, eggs and bacon, are not more necessary to an ordered existence than the orange.