Ladies and gentlemen--men and women, if you like it better--all meet in the water as they do on land, or rather not as they do on land, but in a very first-parentage state of no-dressedness. There they splash, swim, dive, and converse,--float, flirt, talk gossip, and laugh with a most laudable forgetfulness of externals. Introductions and presentations go forward as they would in society, and a gentleman asks you to duck instead of to dance with him. It would be affectation in me were I not to say that I thought all this very shocking at first, and that I really could scarcely bring myself to adopt it; but Lord George, who really swims to perfection, laughed me out of some, and reasoned me out of others of my prejudices, and I will own, dearest Kitty, his arguments were unanswerable. "Were you not very much ashamed," said he, "the first time you saw a ballet, or 'poses plastiques'?--did not the whole strike you as exceedingly indelicate?--and now, would not that very same sense of shame occur to you as real indelicacy, since in these exhibitions it is Art alone you admire,--Art in its graceful development? The 'Ballarina' is not a woman; she is an ideal,--she is a Hebe, a Psyche, an Ariadne, or an Aphrodite. Symmetry, grace, beauty of outline,--these are the charms that fascinate you. Can you not, therefore, extend this spirit to the sea, and, instead of the Marquis of this and the Countess of that, only behold Tritono and sea-nymphs disporting in the flood?" I saw at once the force of this reasoning, Kitty, and perceived that to take any lower view of the subject would be really a gross indelicacy. I tried to make Cary agree with me, but utterly in vain,--she is so devoid of imagination! There is, too, an utter want of refinement in her mind positively hopeless. She even confessed to me that Lord George without his clothes still seemed Lord George to her, and that no effort she could make was able to persuade her that the old Danish Minister in the black leather skullcap had any resemblance to a river god. Mamma behaved much better; seeing that the custom was one followed by all the "best people," she adopted it at once, and though she would scream out whenever a gentleman came to talk to her, I 'm sure, with a few weeks' practice, she 'd have perfectly reconciled herself to "etiquette in the water." Should you, with your very Irish notions, raise hands and eyes at all this, and mutter, "How very dreadful!--how shocking!" and so on, I have only to remind you of what the Princess Pauline said to an English lady, who expressed her prudish horrors at the Princess having "sat for Canova in wet drapery": "Oh, it was not so disagreeable as you think; there was always a fire in the room." Now, Kitty, I make the same reply to your shocked scruples, by saying the sea was deliciously warm. Bathing is here, indeed, a glorious luxury. There is no shivering or shuddering, no lips chattering, blue-nosed, goose-skinned misery, like