After Wivenhoe, the route to Clacton-on-Sea chosen that day, through Thorrington and Great Clacton, seemed dull and was very flat. But Clacton-on-Sea was a remarkable sight then, and is always, during the season, a sight quite _sui generis_. Some of the things witnessed that day will probably never be seen again. The long line of transports and cruisers lying a couple of miles out and extending from Great Holland to Clacton, the horse-boats being towed ashore, were both quite exceptional. Indeed, the horse-boats will certainly never reappear at Clacton or anywhere else, for a storm broke most of them up a day or two later, and the wreckage was sold by auction on the spot. Nor again, most likely, shall we see the Duke of Connaught and his General Staff, and a brilliant group of foreign attachés, naval and military, standing on Clacton beach amidst a seething crowd of East End trippers, and mountebanks, and nigger minstrels, and shell-fish vendors. But Clacton-on-Sea and its casual visitors were true to themselves none the less, and between them they made a quite wonderful spectacle, needing to be seen by the uninitiated before it could be realized, and certainly worth realizing by any easy-going student of human nature. My expeditions to Clacton-on-Sea were not taken by me in the capacity of motorist simply; indeed, the first of them was made on a bicycle, and the others, for there were several more to follow, in a car, when my knowledge of motoring was embryonic. Yet I found in Clacton-on-Sea one of that peculiar class of places which he who follows what may be called public motoring learns to know through the motor-car, and would certainly not have learned to know in any other way. Blackpool is another such place, visited because in several successive years it has broken out into "speed trials," and Douglas in the Isle of Man is another, to which motorists go by reason of the Tourist Trophy Race. Blackpool and Douglas are grander in their kind than Clacton. They have more Winter Gardens--I am not sure that Clacton boasts any at all--huge dancing-rooms, constructed and conducted by municipal enterprise, in which the dancing is marked by a punctilious decorum and, it may be added, by an excellence of execution, which would put the most famous ball-rooms in London to shame. But all three have two points in common. Every prospect, except that of the houses and public buildings, pleases. At each the sea gleams in the sun or crashes on the beach as the case may be. Each has its parade, esplanade, promenade, call it what you will; and this is crowded, as the beach is also, in the season of the year. At Clacton-on-Sea a few of the buildings are tolerable to the eye, and there is one hotel, not the most pretentious of them, which is more than endurable to look at, and quite reasonably comfortable. It stands facing the sea, and its broad veranda is screened by a dense fig-tree carefully trained. A better vantage ground for a weary wayfarer need not be