eplicas of His handiwork up and down the coast. And
under this delusion piers, I suppose, were born.

Well, certainly they are convenient to throw yourself off the end of
them. Happily--or unhappily, whichever way you look at it--the town
council never seem to know quite what to do with them. Beside the
penny fair and the brass band, they only seem to be the haven of rest
for fifth-rate theatrical touring companies, who manage to pay for
their summer outing in the theatre erected at the end. Otherwise their
importance consists chiefly in being a convenient place for the
"flapper" to "meet mother," and to carry on a violent flirtation,
without the slightest danger, with any Gay Lothario in lavender socks
who kind o' tickles them with his eyes and makes them giggle. But for
myself, who have no mamma to meet, nor any desire to flop about with
"flappers," piers are deadly things. Their great excitement is when
the sea washes half of them away at a moment when, apparently, five
thousand people living in boarding-houses had only just vacated them.
And sometimes even that miraculous escape seems a pity! What do you
think?

_Visitors_

I always think that visitors are charming "interruptions." They are
delightful when they arrive; they are equally delightful--perhaps more
so--when they go. Only on the third day of their visit are they
tiresome, and their qualities distinctly below the par we expected.
Almost anybody can put up with almost anybody for three days. There is
the delight of showing him over the house, bringing out all our
treasures and listening the while our visitor shows us his envy (or his
hypocrisy) by his compliments; there is the pleasure of taking him
round the garden and pointing out our own pet plants and bulbs. Even
the servants can keep smiling through three days of extra work. But
the second night begins to see us becoming exhausted. We have said
everything we wanted to say. We have taken him up to the attic and to
the farthest ends of the pig sty, we have laid down the law concerning
our own pet enthusiasms and tolerated him while he told us about his
own. But a sense of boredom begins to creep into our hearts at the end
of the second evening, which, if there were not the pleasure of bidding
him "Good-bye" on the morrow to keep our spirits up, would end in
exasperation to be fought down and a yawn to be suppressed. The man
who invented "long visits" ought to be made to spend the