Seaview, indeed, was first Seagrove before it became a flourishing family bathing-place, with the unusual setting of woods so close down to the water’s edge that one may lie in a boat and hear the nightingale almost overhead; but these groves tantalise the landlubber by a crop of forbidding notices to trespassers. It has a chain pier of its own, and a regular service of steamboats from Southsea, that run on to Bembridge. This pier, with the hotel behind, splits the place into two separate sections, marked by their architecture as belonging to different strata of pleasure-seeking. The part nearer Ryde is the true old Seaview of wandering rows, bow-windowed lodging-houses, and modest refreshment rooms. On the east side of the bay has sprung up a newer, smarter, redder bit of esplanade, making a pretty contrast to its dark green background. A private road leads to this end, which, else, at high tide is cut off, so that the butcher or greengrocer may be seen delivering his wares by boat in quite Venetian manner. There are sands for children, and rocks for scrambling, and a shallow beach for launching canoes on these safe waters, where the red sails of the Bembridge Yacht Club make dots of colour, as do the tents here taking the place of bathing-machines. Another peculiar feature is the diving-boards anchored out at sea, since the tide, creeping up to the Esplanade garden gates, woos paddlers rather than swimmers. Seaview, in short, holds itself something out of the common in the way of bathing-places, dealing with strangers rather in the wholesale way of house-letting than the retail trade of apartments. Beyond the broken point, where one seems to catch Nature in her workshop, kneading clay into firmer forms, a rough walk along the shore of Priory Bay leads on to St Helen’s, reached inland by the road through Nettlestone Green. Once clear of houses, we plunge among the rank greenery of the Island, too much monopolised here by the grounds of the Priory, which preserves the name of a colony of monks swarmed over from France to St Helen’s in early Plantagenet days. This was one of the properties bought by Emmanuel Badd, who, _teste_ Sir John Oglander, began life as a poor shoemaker’s apprentice at Newport, “but by God’s blessinge and ye loss of 5 wyfes, he grewe very ritch,” rose to be High Sheriff of Hants, and was buried under an epitaph in Jacobean taste, ending So good a Bad doth this same grave contain, Would all like Bad were that with us remain! But at St Helen’s we have rounded the corner of the Island, which we may now survey from another line of operations. NEWPORT