That was the elaborate way in which excuses were made for holiday-making in the ’60’s. Such were the methods of the English in the days when crinolines were worn and chignons were considered fashionable. Our fathers and mothers, it will quite readily be perceived, were not yet emancipated from the workaday ideal that had hitherto governed England: that grim, joyless, slogging spirit that had made the nation great, but made it dour as well; and no one, you know, felt really quite easy in conscience at taking holiday. To revel in doing nothing was unknown. So some excuse, some way out of a difficulty, had to be invented, and it generally was found in such transparent pretexts as above. And yet Ramsgate sands were as crowded then as now, and the “husbands’ boats” that plied from London were full. Frith painted his celebrated picture of Ramsgate sands, showing a merry throng, looking the “picture of health”; and so it is very evident that a large number of people successfully adopted the holiday for health’s sake deception. “And now,” continues our guide, “the seaside towns get busy. Those virtuous elderly spinsters who have lived the long winter months in their deserted houses, solitary as spiders in their webs, wake up from their torpidity and grow lively with the summer heat. They take from the linen-closet the clean blinds for the bedroom windows, and the net curtains for the ‘handsome drawing-rooms’ and ‘neat parlours’; the faded chintz coverings are washed and ironed; and, buying a bottle of furniture-polish, they make their poor arms ache with rubbing up the dull tables and sideboards into a waxy lustre. The stationer sells off his stock of embossed cards, engraved with ‘Apartments to Let,’ and the spirited proprietors of libraries, bazaars, and assembly-rooms have their pianos tuned, and make arrangements with musicians and singers from London.”