It was late in the hot afternoon, when we came into Bournemouth, through what seemed to us miles of suburban roads and endless rows of stucco villas. This is what Mr. Stevenson calls “the uncharted wilderness of Bournemouth,” and, indeed, we found the phrase happy and the place not at all to our liking. From what we saw of the famed pine-woods we were not impressed with them; gaunt battalions of tall trees, bare as scaffold-poles and as straight, with never a branch nor sign of foliage within a matter of forty feet from the ground, and that ground covered with a frowzy matting of husky, colourless fir-spines--a Bournemouth pine-wood is a depressing place. If Bournemouth had been invented when the era of the Interesting Invalid was yet with us, I can conceive how grand a site it would have been for the novelist’s plots (plots, that is to say, in a technical sense, for under no circumstances could one imagine robustious plottings and deeds of derring-do at Bournemouth). Building-plots are Bournemouth’s nearest approach to the romantic. Languorous romances of the fading-away-in-the-twilight order would have been written with an anæmic heroine effectively displayed against a striking background of whispering fir-trees, and--but you all know that sort of thing! But this was not to be. Long before Bournemouth had sprung into importance, the Interesting Invalid had grown unfashionable, and there reigned in her stead the robust young woman of fine Du Maurieresque physique, and energetic, not to say athletic and slangy habits. Bournemouth, truly, is thronged with invalids, but not chiefly with the interesting variety: that sort went out with the crinoline. Here the Bath Chair is the most familiar object of the sea-shore, and the mild and offensively inoffensive chair-man has attained in his numbers the dignity of a class.