_Going on the sands_ is the weakest of the Gent’s pastimes: but he says, with a loud laugh, that it is to see the ladies bathe. Elsewhere it would be confined to watching children bury one another in the sand, with small wooden spades—a performance which, like a pantomime, however interesting on first representation, somewhat flags in interest upon repetition. The Gent usually takes two chairs to rest upon, and stares hard at every body else, especially the females, the while he sketches feeble designs with his short stick, which he never by any means parts with, on the sand. [Illustration] _Going out sailing_ is also a slow business—slower than a few friends after a dinner-party for a carpet polka; or a standard five-act-play; or a wedding breakfast; or the outside half of yesterday’s _Times_; or a book written with a “high moral purpose;” or a Charing-Cross-to-the-Bank omnibus—and that is saying a good deal: the Gent, however, likes it: for then he puts on a shirt ruled with blue ink, the collar of which he turns down: and talks of “jibs,” and “tacks,” and “sheets,” and also alludes to the man he knows who keeps a yacht. And he takes his cigar—his loved cigar—as soon as he leaves the harbour. And as he leaves the harbour he stands in an attitude, and believes that the young ladies who show their ankles on the pier imagine him to be a Red Rover. Perhaps _Going on the pier_ is the Ramsgate Gent’s greatest treat: because then he can put on his gay clothes, and once more think that he is rather the thing. But in this the Gent makes a great mistake. He dresses but once in the day, and then puts on a frock-coat, which he wears to dinner, and all the evening; not exactly understanding, we expect, what is the real difference between morning and evening toilets. For as Gentlemen usually dress after a walk, so do Gents dress before one: and if they do not appear in their “best” to walk up and down the pier—which at Ramsgate is the chief straw that the sinking _ennuyés_ clutch at—and stare superciliously at all whom they do not know, they think they are snobs—the snob being to the Gent what the Gent is to the Gentleman.