en of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift at last
frantically to clamber back into it; he snatches the small, damp towels,
and attempts to dry his shivering limbs; his clothes have fallen on the
wet floor; he cannot force his blue toes into his oozy socks. At the
moment he is attempting to wriggle himself into his trousers the horse
is hitched-to again, and the jerky and jolty journey back up the
beach begins. If the hair of a boy of ten could turn white in a single
morning, there would be many a hoary-headed youngster in British
watering-places. John Leech, in Punch, used to make pictures of the
experiences I have outlined, and I studied them with deep attention and
sympathy. The artist, too, must have suffered from the sea-ogresses in
his youth, else he could not have portrayed the outrage so vividly. The
mock-cheerfulness and hideous maternal parody of their "Come, my little
man!" has no parallel in life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the
fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would
forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the
decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that
nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite
found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I
detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity
may use it, as I have done, for a paper-weight. Thanks to eternal
justice, the bathing-machines and the bathing-women will have gone to
their place long ere then!

My father had given me a book called The Aquarium, written by Philip
Henry Gosse (father of the present poet, essayist, and critic),
illustrated with pictures of sea-anemones and other marine creatures
done from his own drawings in color, and so well done that nothing which
has been done since in the way of color-reproductions surpasses them.
It was delightfully written, and I absorbed it into my very soul, and my
dreams by night and longings by day were for an aquarium of my own. At
last--I think this was at Southport--a glass jar was given me; it was
an inverted bell-glass, mounted on a wooden stand, and it cost ten
shillings. I wonder if men often love their wives or children with
the adoring tenderness that I lavished upon that bell-glass and its
contents! I got sand and covered the bottom; I found two jagged stones
and leaned them against each other on the sand; I gathered fronds of
ulva latissim