The Granville does things on a lordly scale, and has an express of its own from London. Down below it, indeed, and in direct communication, is the railway station, on the sands, beneath the cliffs. There is a forthright, downright manner about the railway company which rather challenges admiration, even if the slowness and unpunctuality of its trains and the filthiness of its carriages evoke our disgust. The Company seems to say, “You want to go to the seaside at Ramsgate?” and then, without more ado, not only conveys you, but, in a manner of speaking, actually deposits you on the seashore, as near the sea as possible; short of being actually flung into it. The railway comes in by a black inferno of tunnel, and smokes the cliffs to a sooty hue. And here, before you, are the famous sands of Ramsgate, playground in the summer season of uncounted thousands of holiday-folk. They have rendered this no place for a quiet holiday; and effectively disprove the ancient and much-quoted saying, wrongly attributed to Froissart, “The English take their pleasures sadly.” Can you come away from Ramsgate sands with that belief? It is rather curious nowadays to read Dickens’s short story, “The Tuggses at Ramsgate,” to note that, in the novelist’s mind, a more or less vulgar Cockney who had suddenly found himself possessed of twenty thousand pounds, would think at once of Ramsgate as a holiday-place for himself and family. He would probably not do so now; but the general trend of popular literature in those days was in the same direction of comparatively unenterprising holidays on the nearest coast-line.