The English are learning to enjoy _plage_ life, but they are not naturally ready for its beguilements as the French and Italians are; while the Germans, after their wont, overdo it, with a coarse self-consciousness and their always visible intention of extracting the last drop of material bliss. The Italians are children in the water and on the sands: the dark, hairy men, the placid, olive-hued women with subterranean fires. At Rimini, where it is really hot, one lives all day in bathing clothes, alternately in the water and out; but from twelve to one everyone is eating, and from one to three everyone is asleep--except the indefatigable children. In those hours the sands under the tent awnings present the appearance of a battle-field, strewn with the prismatic dead. This to the human eye; to the eye of a sand insect the scene must be more like the South Downs to a Wealden labourer, such are the undulating contours of the full-length Italian parents who repose in profusion and negligence on every hand. These parents were more entertaining to me than any of the younger bathers: they were so patiently happy; so sensibly careless of their habiliments; so wisely unmindful of their bulk; such creatures of comfort. Their pretty daughters and slender sons had their vanities; the parents were without any. I had often wondered when abroad what kind of impression one makes. All these swarthy Italian men, for example, looked like tenors: but what type did I, for instance, suggest to the Italian eye, if any? There are many more casts of face in England than in Italy, and several more than in France; and now that whiskers have gone out and clean shaving is the fashion it must puzzle the continental caricaturist to fix the English type. But of one thing I feel certain, that our little party broke no hearts. No dark Italian eyes looked yearningly our way: the Carusi will always win there. Few of the Italians, young or old, thought of swimming. Their pleasure was to stand about or make lazy voyages on the double-canoe rafts, meanwhile carrying on conversations with their tent at terrific range. Only the English or an eccentric native thought of swimming, and the English, so far as I know, were confined to our own party.