32 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



compounded of present vigour and boyish associations. 

 He is too old for the circulating library ; has outlived 

 straw-hats and coloured shirts ; and is supremely indif- 

 ferent to telescopes. He is happy. He gives a genial 

 glance of interest to everything. He stops us, and 

 politely inquires about the contents of our baskets, 

 listening to the brief details with "dear me ! bless me ! 

 well, how very singular ! " and even tliinks he should 

 like to go out collecting himself, — if he were younger. 



If the j^i'omenaders are not supremely interesting, 

 the scene itself is worth a visit. The Capstone Parade, 

 a. walk cut round the Capstone at great expense, offers 

 many ^^ictures. We are at the farther end, nearest the 

 quay, and look back upon old Hillsborough jutting out 

 far into the water, while behind him looms the giant 

 Hangman, grim as his name, and beyond that the 

 purple line of another headland. Between us and 

 Hillsborough stands Lantern Hill, a picturesque mass of 

 green and grey, surmounted by an old bit of building 

 which was once a convent, and which looks as if it were 

 the habitation of some huo;e mollusc that had secreted 

 its shell from the material of the rock. Indeed the 

 houses all about naturally recall the curious shells and 

 habitats with which our hunting has made us familiar. 

 In mountainous districts, where houses and clusters of 

 houses look so tiny in comparison with the huge limbs 

 of Mother Earth, one is apt to think of man as a para- 

 sitic animal living on a grander creature — an epizoon 

 nestling in the skin of this planetary organism, which 

 rolls through space like a ciliated ovum rolling through 



