can, gate, moat, drawbridge, towers,
bastions, donjon-keep and banqueting-hall complete. A brass band--the
members in full uniform of bright colors, with little rimless
red-and-gold caps--is playing under the battlemented garden-wall which
backs the sands in one place. Listen to the tunes! Heard you ever
these peculiar airs before? The "Bells of Aberdovey" jangle their
sweet chime over the wind-blown scene. The "March of the Men of
Harlech" fills all the air with its stirring scarlet strain. The
quaint melody of "Hob y deri dando" moves the feet of youth to
restlessness: not that it is a jig, in spite of the jiggy look of
the words to English eyes, but because it has been twisted into the
service of Terpsichore by a famous band-master in his "Welsh Lancers."
"Hob y deri dando" is a love-song:

All the day I sigh and cry, love,
Hob y deri dando!
All the night I say and pray, love,
Hob y deri dando![A]

[Footnote A: This phrase is sometimes supposed to be the original
of the English "Hey down, derry, derry down!" but the old Druidic
song-burden, "Come, let us hasten to the oaken grove," is in Welsh
"Hai down ir deri dando," which is nearer the English phrase.]

A hand-organ with monkey attachment is delighting a group of children
on another part of the sands. Yonder, too, is a balladist with a
guitar, bawling at the top of his lungs,

The dream 'as parst, the spell his broken,
'Opes 'ave faded one by one:
Th' w'isper'd words, so sweetly spoken,
Hall like faded flow'rs har gone.
Still that woice hin music lingers,
Loike er 'arp 'oose silver strings,
Softly swep' by fairy fingers,
Tell of hunforgotten things.

Nobody pays much attention to this wandering minstrel: he is happy if
at the close of his song a penny finds its way into the battered hat
he extends for largess. He is clearly a stranger to this part of the
world, and has probably tramped down here from London by easy stages,
and will have to tramp back again as he came, without much profit from
his provincial tour.

The fashionable world which is sunning itself on the sands is made up,
for the most part, of the usual types of a British watering-place--the
pea-jacketed swell with blase manner and one-eyed quizzing-glass; the
occasional London cad in clothes of painful newness and exaggeration
of style, such as no gentleman by any chance ever wears in Britain;
the young sprig of nobility with effeminate face an