Now this starchiness would not have been remarkable in Southport or Folkestone, where one meets so many pompous, old, superior persons, puffed up with the importance of their little pension, annuity, or snug, retiring hoard; nor in Scarborough, where many visitors are genuine "toffs," and naturally privileged to look down upon the common herd. But this crowd at Lowestoft consisted unmistakably of the genteel working class--the clerks at £150 to £300 a year, the small shopkeepers, the--in short, the genteel working class. In Lancashire this class, though disposed to a sort of blunt arrogance at home, become humanised when holiday-making. They will condescend to fuse with their "inferiors," and when united, as in this case, by common misfortune, they will even condescend to be affable. Not so the genteel workman of Cockaigne. That he is a workman he never remembers; that he is genteel he never forgets. Even when he has divested himself of his customary frock-coat and tall silk hat, he remains still clothed with his cumbrous and sombre gentility. It is to him as valour was to his forebears. It serves him in lieu of honour or religion. His gentility is of his possessions the most sacred: rather than that, he would lose his honesty, his manliness, and his humanity. The silence was broken by the irruption of a bustling newcomer, who, as he shook his dripping cap, cheerily cried, "Good Laur! it does come down!" He looked round for acknowledgment, but the genteel gentlemen from London stonily stared into vacancy. Undiscouraged, the newcomer took off his mackintosh, offered a jest about the weather, beamed cordially upon the crowd, and playfully cuffed the ears of the boy who demanded, "No d-r-r-rink, no d-r-r-rink for me." "All right," he said, "if you don't want any drink, you needn't cry about it. I'll take your share when the whisky comes." Again he glanced round with an inviting smile, but the petrified images looked remote, unfriendly, melancholy, slow. But this chilliness troubled him no more than a frosty morning troubles the jovial sun. He beamed and glowed and laughed and talked, and, despite themselves, the genteel glaciers thawed. "That man," I said to myself, "comes from the North." His next speech told of storms he had seen--at Blackpool! of seas washing over the promenade wetting him "three streets back." One of the gentlemen from London cast a look of curiosity. The man from the North went on to tell how he had taken a day's sail from Blackpool, and, being unable to land there at night, had been carried to Fleetwood, and thence back by rail after midnight. "How was that?" asked the gentleman who had looked interested; "haven't they a pier at Blackpool?" Fancy that to a Blackpoolite! It was as if one had asked a sailor whether he had ever seen the sea, a Scotch reporter whether he had tasted whisky, a French soldier whether he had ever heard the "Marseillaise," or a Southport man whether he knew what sand was.