amiable nature. You would say so, if you only saw the baker
helping a new comer to find suitable apartments.

So far from being at a discount as to company, we are in fact what
would be popularly called rather a nobby place. Some tip-top
'Nobbs' come down occasionally - even Dukes and Duchesses. We have
known such carriages to blaze among the donkey-chaises, as made
beholders wink. Attendant on these equipages come resplendent
creatures in plush and powder, who are sure to be stricken
disgusted with the indifferent accommodation of our watering-place,
and who, of an evening (particularly when it rains), may be seen
very much out of drawing, in rooms far too small for their fine
figures, looking discontentedly out of little back windows into
bye-streets. The lords and ladies get on well enough and quite
good-humouredly: but if you want to see the gorgeous phenomena who
wait upon them at a perfect non-plus, you should come and look at
the resplendent creatures with little back parlours for servants'
halls, and turn-up bedsteads to sleep in, at our watering-place.
You have no idea how they take it to heart.

We have a pier - a queer old wooden pier, fortunately without the
slightest pretensions to architecture, and very picturesque in
consequence. Boats are hauled up upon it, ropes are coiled all
over it; lobster-pots, nets, masts, oars, spars, sails, ballast,
and rickety capstans, make a perfect labyrinth of it. For ever
hovering about this pier, with their hands in their pockets, or
leaning over the rough bulwark it opposes to the sea, gazing
through telescopes which they carry about in the same profound
receptacles, are the Boatmen of our watering-place. Looking at
them, you would say that surely these must be the laziest boatmen