At other seaside places the shallowness of the sand limits the pure delight of children in their castle-building. Here it seems boundless. I saw one sturdy urchin yesterday throwing out stoneless sand from a hole some four feet deep. The castles and engineering works are therefore on a splendid scale, several of them from five to ten yards across, inside which bits of old spars (portions, I fear, of wrecks) are utilised for causeways and bridges. The infant builders are ambitious, for I have seen frequent attempts, not wholly unsuccessful, at putting sand steeples on the churches. These higher efforts were all made by girls, who, indeed, I regret to say, seemed to do not only the decorative, but the substantial work. The boys employed themselves mainly in creeping through the holes which the girls had dug under the spars, to represent bridges, and in knocking down the boundary walls. Is this a sign of our topsy-turvy times? In my day, we boys did all the building and engineering, and the girls used to come and sit on our walls, and destroy our castles. On this highest part of the sands, the children’s playground, there stand also certain skeletons of booths, to be covered with canvas, I presume, in the summer, for the sale of ginger-beer and cakes. These, the largest especially, some nine feet high, attracted the boys, several of whom essayed to reach the highest cross-bar. Only one succeeded while I watched, a born sailor-boy, who was not to be foiled, and succeeded in getting on to it. There he sat, and looked scornfully down on the sand-diggers, in the temper, no doubt, of the chorus of the old sea song-- We jolly sailor boys a-sitting up aloft, And the land-lubbers funking down below. After a time he descended, and, looking for a few moments at the diggers, went straight away across the sands towards the sea. I saw that he had only a wooden spade, while most of theirs had iron heads. There is another kind of amusement which is strange to me, being necessarily confined to great expanses of sand. A boat on wheels, called the _Flying Dutchman_, careers along at a splendid pace when there is wind enough, and I am told can tack handily, and never runs into the sea. If it did, it would not matter, as it must at once upset in such case in very shoal water. When the Royal Society was here, several eminent philosophers were reported to be disporting themselves in the _Flying Dutchman_, when the President, Professor Cayley, called on them to read papers, or make promised speeches.