There can be no freedom and very little enjoyment, and there is great risk of infection at the seaside unless the house is shared by someone we may happen to know, if we take only a part of a house. We may have a fidgety mortal who sends up twenty times a day to ask our children to be quiet, or we may have a screaming, badly managed baby near us, a piano which plays just when we don’t want it to play, or we may meet on the stairs a convalescent from some childish complaint, who may hand it on to our children, and bring our holiday to an abrupt conclusion with measles or whooping-cough. Then there are always the landlady, the larder difficulties, and the horrors of being waited on by strange servants, generally most inferior ones, and always those who cannot and do not understand our ways. Therefore I maintain that a house is a _sine quâ non_, and that if we cannot afford to take one and go away comfortably we had better remain at home; if we leave we may get fresher air, we shall have the necessary change, but the change will be for the worse, and the good the fresher air may do will be more than outbalanced by the continual rasping worry of arranging, and very likely battling with the servants, who resent the landlady’s interference, and won’t do any more work than they can help, under the mistaken idea that the house-servants are to wait on them, and in the endless worries caused by the disappearance of one’s food, and the disagreeable feeling that everything one touches has probably been well ‘pawed over’ by the lodging-house maid, if not by the mistress herself.