And now as we sat drinking tea in the parlour of our house on that fine October Sunday afternoon, our conversation was as homely as the picture we made. Nevertheless it involved a topic of considerable interest to us. My little boy Johnny had been looking somewhat pale, and his appetite was not as I, his mother, considered it should be. The summer had been a very hot one, and when it is even moderately warm in most parts of England, it is commonly very broiling indeed in our city of the Abbey Church, where there are tall hills to protect the population from the breeze, where the roads are steep, glaring, and dusty, and where the width of many of the streets is quite out of proportion to the stature of the houses, so that you do not know where to look for shade. My husband’s business would not suffer him to leave home until the early autumn, and he could not prevail upon me to go away without him; but now he was able to take a holiday for a month, and the doctor had recommended the seaside for little Johnny and the baby, and as we sat drinking tea we talked of the best place to go to. ‘It does not matter to me what part of the coast you choose,’ said my husband. ‘I only stipulate that you shall not select a town that is confidently recommended by the whole of the medical faculty, and whose medical officer every year sends to the newspapers a statement that the death-rate is the lowest in England, and that it is the healthiest seaside resort in the United Kingdom.’ ‘Then you shut every seaside town against us,’ said my sister, ‘for every seaside town is the healthiest in England.’ I named Margate; my husband made a grimace. ‘No,’ he exclaimed, ‘I should not like to return to Bath and say we have been to Margate. It was only the other day I heard General Cramp swear that Margate was not the vulgarest place in all England, oh no! but the vulgarest place in all the world.’ ‘Its air is very fine,’ said I, ‘and it is fine air that we want.’ And here I looked at Johnny. ‘What does it matter to us what sort of people go to Margate, if its air is good?’ ‘I will not go to Margate,’ said my husband. My sister named two or three towns on the coast. ‘Let us,’ said my husband, ‘go to some place where there is no hotel and where there is no pier.’ ‘And where there is no circulating library,’ cried I, ‘and where there are two miles of mud when the water is out.’