Fair Summer has come, and the ocean wooes us. Breaking her ward, she has leapt like a lovely Bacchante to our arms; while men who have been “sighing like furnace” for her, and chiding the dull delay of her coming, now fly from her embraces into the sea—plunge into the haunts of the Nereids. In what “infernal machines” do they go a-wooing! And yet they appear to have every confidence in their natural powers of attraction; the Nereids run no danger of being deceived as to the _physique_ of their human admirers. Queer fishes some of them are certainly! Only look at yon big fat old fellow, for all the world like a skinned porpoise, floundering and blowing in the shallows like a stranded whale! while another more modest animal, of like dimensions, floats like cork or blubber in deep water, thumping energetically with leg and arm, and hides obesity in a cataract of foam. Yonder, over the clear blue depths, breasting at his ease the flood, goes the long steady stroke of the practised swimmer—an animal half-amphibious, seen at times afar off, lifting on the crest of a wave a mile at sea. With laugh and splutter a band of juveniles rub their heads with water in the most approved manner, as if they were a set of old topers afraid of apoplexy; or with whoop and hollo engage in a water-combat, or in a race in bunting that reminds one of running in sacks; while a still younger member of the human family roars lustily as he clings to his pitiless nurse’s neck, or emerges half-suffocated from the prescriptive thrice-repeated dip. Yet there is something gladsome in the flash of the waters around the sportive bathers, and in the glancing glitter of the sun-beams on the ivory-like arms that are swaying to and fro upon the blue waters. It speaks of Summer; and that of itself awakens gladness.