ldren in detail, as
it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a
perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child
meets us, but we never realize the world of children till we see it
massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the
schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale
cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all
tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting
placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at
the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of
their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children,
demure children--all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp
between the cliffs and the sea.

It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us
is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the
little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The
mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These
brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that
they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from
endless dressings--dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch,
dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert--an
escape from fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff
little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible
triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea,
dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then
too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those
dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible
arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their
practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at
the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no
time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only
time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to
the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a
hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books,
they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just
now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of
the day.

The one interest of existence is in