A FIRST STAGE BY SEA. 501 



effective, to strip to the shirt and do the job yourself, although 

 such a proceeding might hardly be deemed compatible with 

 dignity — the cheap peg on which hang position and esteem. 

 Yet it does one good occasionally to break the ice, to dip below 

 the level we deem our own, to be rubbed the wrong way by the 

 coarser forms of life — and to thank God afterward that England 

 still retains some little class distinction. Strangest of all, you 

 never realise the existence of this so fully as when ruffianism 

 pulls itself up short on the verge of insult, and turns away from 

 a border-line that in many countries it is held excellent to 

 breach. 



Now I will take you at a plunge to a lowest experience of 

 compagnons de voyage and road travel. 



A first stage from the Isle of Wight Londonwards brings in a 

 sea transit — Ryde to Portsmouth. 



There are some big hotels at Ryde, as is in keeping with 

 autumnal and annual influx of visitors. But these visitors come 

 to boat, to pier-parade, to look through one-eyed spy-glasses — 

 anything, in fact, but a-horseback or in carriage. Ryde is 

 marine. The flush of the sea-foam tints the Naiads who lend 

 life and delight to sea- wave and shore ; while the main ambi- 

 tion of the yachter by profession and by clo' — as distinct from 

 the pukkah enthusiast, who, by the same token, is likely to 

 haunt less ostensibly maritime centres — is to be brown, weather- 

 oeaten — the old tar, the merry salt. Horses are apart from the 

 Isle, as regards extraneous intrusion. The Wight people need 

 them for their own use — to work the excursion drag in summer, 

 and to hunt the fox in winter ; for the Island is by no means 

 without hounds, and but for its railways would be a snug little 

 country. But that has nothing to do with you or with my 

 instance. 



The Isle of Wight evidently prefers to depend upon her own 

 resources. She wants no traffic with the adjacent little island 

 of Britain, and she certainly expects no autumn visitor to come 

 armed with a horse and trap, that of himself he may explore her 

 inner beauties. So it comes about that an application for pas- 



