In these varied and brightly–coloured costumes, the bathers cut gay figures. But the picture is composed and completed when they enter into action. At the edge of the water, the gentlemen bathers, sometimes portly and rotund, having threaded in bare feet their way down through the ladies sitting on the stairs, and through the crowd of spectators on the sand, wait with patience in their brilliant, tight, and unusual attire, the observed of all observers, the arrival of their lady friends, if they any have, and on their arrival, taking their hand, accompany them into the water; or the ladies take the hand of a bathing man engaged to attend them, and march in under their charge, and presently they are in the clear salt water, alive with bathers in every colour and in every form of movement practised by those who go down to the sea to bathe. Some rush from the shore wildly and inhumanly into the water, and, wickedly regardless of frightening the small fishes, dive head foremost with a splash, and strike out. Others stalk in majestically, and either quietly push far out, or paddle about pretending or attempting to swim in shallow water. Then other gentlemen are giving encouragement to their little boys or girls, or to their wives, or possibly their lovers, or improbably their sisters, either dipping them, or helping them to swim, or teaching them to float, or joining in other usual maritime gyrations. Others catch hold of the rope stretched out if the water be low, and dance about in a mad and profitless way, or if the tide be high, the swimmers catch at it as they pass and take a rest; and sometimes, if at a proper height, an adventurous one will sit upon the rope, like a sparrow on a telegraph wire, when (perhaps beholding admiringly from the treacherous seat some fat lady floating on her back on the surface, her bathing integuments undulating in the water like the tentacular folds of a jelly–fish) of a sudden somebody else, perhaps waggishly, perhaps innocently, clutches at the slack rope, and with unexpected shock upsets the unwary, abstracted philosopher, who with a whirl capsizes heels in the air, and head making discoveries through eyegate, nosegate, and mouthgate in the brine below. Or two recently arrived English young ladies will walk in, hand in hand, scorning the aid of a bathing man, and perform together, with all the regularity of clockwork, an endless series of curtsey ducks in the water without stirring from the safely selected spot. Other ladies, to vary the programme, are carried out by a bathing man and dipped horizontally in the wave, so that head and feet obtain ablution simultaneously; or a stout matron will take hold of a bathing man, who swims out with her on his back apparently, so that she enjoys the luxury of being buoyed up and drawn through the water, and can say, ‘I’m afloat.’ But these sham swimmers are notably the exceptions. The great matter of observation is that the vast majority of the ladies,