each; and that boat will be manned, as surely and as cheerfully, as
if a thousand pounds were told down on the weather-beaten pier.
For this, and for the recollection of their comrades whom we have
known, whom the raging sea has engulfed before their children's
eyes in such brave efforts, whom the secret sand has buried, we
hold the boatmen of our watering-place in our love and honour, and
are tender of the fame they well deserve.

So many children are brought down to our watering-place that, when
they are not out of doors, as they usually are in fine weather, it
is wonderful where they are put: the whole village seeming much too
small to hold them under cover. In the afternoons, you see no end
of salt and sandy little boots drying on upper window-sills. At
bathing-time in the morning, the little bay re-echoes with every
shrill variety of shriek and splash - after which, if the weather
be at all fresh, the sands teem with small blue mottled legs. The
sands are the children's great resort. They cluster there, like
ants: so busy burying their particular friends, and making castles
with infinite labour which the next tide overthrows, that it is
curious to consider how their play, to the music of the sea,
foreshadows the realities of their after lives.

It is curious, too, to observe a natural ease of approach that
there seems to be between the children and the boatmen. They
mutually make acquaintance, and take individual likings, without
any help. You will come upon one of those slow heavy fellows
sitting down patiently mending a little ship for a mite of a boy,
whom he could crush to death by throwing his lightest pair of
trousers on him. You will be sensible of the oddest contrast
between the smooth little creature, and the rough man who seems to