I doubt whether a child has any sense of what I may call the appeal of breadth. If it is confronted with a fine view, it will concentrate its interest on a windmill or a doll’s house, and the seaside is no more than a place where one wears no shoes or stockings, and the manufacture of mud pies becomes suddenly licit. The child does not share the torments of the adult Londoner, who feels that there is no room in the world to stretch his arms and legs, and therefore wins a pathetic sense of freedom in seeing the long yellow sands and the green wastes of the sea. Nor is it at all excited by the consideration that there is a lot more sea beyond the horizon; the extent of its interest in the water is the limit to which it may paddle. Yet in some dim, strange way the child realises æsthetic values more here than elsewhere. I am quite sure it can see no real beauty in its normal surroundings. Sunsets and small houses lit for evening, the shining streets after rain, and even flowers and pictures and dolls, are never beautiful to a child in the sense that a story or an idea may be beautiful. But tacitly, for a child has no language to express such things, something of the blueness of the sea seems to seek expression in its eyes, something of the sparkle of the sand seems to be tangled in its hair, something of the sunshine burns in its rounded calves that glow like brown eggs. A child is always a thing of wonder. But on the edge of the sea this wonder deepens until the artificial observer is abashed. A seaside child is no creature to be petted and laughed over; it were as easy to pet the tireless waters, and to laugh over the grave of a little cat; children whom one has known very well indeed in town will find new playing fields by the sea into which it is impossible to follow them. Dorothy weighs five stone four pounds at Maida Vale; at Littlehampton the sea wind blows her along like a feather; she is become a wispy, spiritual thing, a faint, fair creature a-dance on light feet that would make the fairy-girl of a poet’s dream seem clumsy by comparison. She is nearer to us when she paddles. The warm sand creeping up through her toes, the silver thread of coolness about her legs, these things are within our comprehension though they fall no more within our experience. But when she flings herself along the beach with the wild hair and loose limbs and the song of an innocent Bacchante, when she bids the gold sands heave up and support her body, tired with play, when she stoops to gather diamonds and pearls from the shore made wet and smooth by the retreating waves, she is as far from us and our human qualities as a new-awakened butterfly. There have been sea-washed moments when I should not have been astonished if she had flung out a pair of mother-of-pearl wings and stood in the blue sky, like a child saint in a stained-glass window. There have been other moments when she has approached me with a number of