As you sit in the bow-window of your comfortable lodging at your favourite watering-place during your annual autumn holiday, your breakfast finished and the _débris_ removed, the newspaper rustling idly on your knees, and the first and pleasantest pipe of the day between your lips, you look up and see the aspect of affairs in the little street below very much changed from its normal state. The pleasure-boats--the _Lively Nancy_, which sails so regularly at eleven A.M. with a cargo of happy excursionists, and which arrives in port at irregular intervals varying from one to three, laden with leaden-coloured men and hopelessly-bedraggled fainting women; the _William and Ellen_, in which you go out to catch codling and plaice; and all the other little craft usually stationed on the beach--have been bodily removed, their owners and touters are drinking rum and smoking shag-tobacco in evil-smelling little public-houses, and their customers have no notion of putting them into requisition. The bathing-machines,--those cumbrous vehicles in which you have so often made that dread journey into the ocean, after being bidden to "stand by" while the horse gives his first awful jerk and afterwards dashes you against the sides of your travelling-prison, while you catch horribly-distorted glimpses of your wretched countenance in the miserable little sixpenny looking-glass pendant from the rusty nail and swinging here and there like a live thing convulsed,--the bathing-machines have all been dragged from the spot where they ordinarily stand like a row of hideous guardians of the coast, and have defiantly taken possession of one side of the little main street. The place where the German band subsidised by the town usually pours forth its perpetual iteration of the "Faust" waltz is now covered with roaring plunging waves, thick brown walls of water rearing their white crests a hundred yards off, as if in survey of their ultimate goal, tearing madly onward, gathering in size and strength at every stride, and at length discharging themselves with a thunder-crash in a blinding avalanche of spray. These 'waves, this roaring seething mass of trembling turgid water, is the great attraction to-day. In vain the monkey on the three-legged table clashes his cymbals, or plies the ramrod of his gun with frantic energy; in vain the good-looking Italian boy, his master, shows his gleaming teeth or touches his hat to attract attention; in vain the Highlander blows discord into his bagpipes until all the neighbouring dogs possessing musical ears are howling in misery. Nobody cares for anything but the sea to-day; the little parade is thronged with visitors all gazing seaward, all rapt in attention on the boiling waters; at one point, where the waves dash in and sweep over the solid masonry, boys rush in between the ebb and flow, returning happy if they have escaped, happier if they have been soaked by the spray. People look out all round and scan the horizon to