desired. From that cool veranda, reflecting that it is every whit as comfortable to sit under somebody else's fig-tree as under one's own, I looked on the passing and re-passing crowd on the parade, like Dido gazing from her watch-tower at the departing ships of Æneas, but in a very different mood. In truth the spectacle was both amusing and perplexing. At first sight it seemed for all the world as if hundreds, and even thousands, of smart ladies, of the kind one sees at Ascot or even at Goodwood, had cast aside all prejudices of position, and were consorting with men whom the conventions of society assign to a lower rank. Dresses and sunshades and hats were all spotlessly clean, colours were subdued and delicate. Closer inspection would no doubt have revealed to the trained eye of a woman that the frocks were ill-made and badly "hung," that the materials were cheap, which is bad, and that they looked cheap, which is worse. To a man it revealed nothing of this, nothing more at first than a vast number of girls, walking well, and some of them quite pretty, in the company of young fellows who, worthy representatives of an excellent class as they may have been, were clearly not gentlemen. Their dress alone betrayed that, not by dint of shabbiness, but rather by its excessive and ill-judged smartness. Then voices became clear; the twang of the male and female Cockney filled the air as the so-called music of a Jew's-harp, or of an orchestra of Jew's-harps; and finally a closer view revealed the gruesome fact that these dainty creatures were consuming periwinkles, with the aid of a pin, as they walked, were crunching shrimps between their pearly teeth, and getting rid of the superfluous integument by--well, by the usual process of the East End of London, without any help from the hand; in fact, by pure propulsion from pouting lips. Half of the mystery was solved. The elegant nymphs of Clacton-on-Sea were simply East End girls who had made the cheap trip by sea. But the mystery of their attire remained, was indeed doubled. Where were the "fevvers," the flowing ostrich plumes of many hues, without which the traditional girl of the East End reckons herself disgraced? Whence had the far more pleasing dresses come? Inquiry made, not of those who wore them, since their powers of repartee are proverbial, elicited the suggestion that all this pretty finery was hired for the day from one or other of the many big drapers at the East End. If so, it can only be said that the taste shown was, on the whole, excellent, and the general effect very good and pleasing. So really was the spectacle. Laughing and talking, eating endless shell-fish, and consuming really very little alcoholic liquor, these young folks strutted and preened themselves in the sun all the livelong day. They even found pennies, hard earned no doubt, to bestow upon the Pierrots and the nigger-minstrels who assaulted the ear on all sides.