AT THE SEASIDE. 19 



your feet before breakfast ? " How well it all comes back upon 

 the memory. Yet what a sea rolls between that point of time 

 and the present ! Ay de mi ! ay de mi ! 



But the earliest recollection of the sea is not always so be- 

 nign. As there are boys whose whole inner life opens out 

 under its influence, so there are others whose first remembrance 

 of it is like a frightful dream. They keenly recall the bathing 

 to which they were injudiciously condemned before their 

 nerves had acquired strength, and any familiarity with the 

 waves had been established. The horrors of those first bathes 

 haunt them like a bugbear, and they were conducted in a 

 manner, we would fain hope, which is now everywhere obsolete. 

 No greater refinement of cruelty could be fancied than to take 

 a timid child into a bathing-machine on a rough day, undress 

 him, and thrust him out to an old harridan waiting in the waves 

 to give him the three orthodox dips. The more he screamed the 

 longer did his amphibious persecutor keep him under, always 

 waiting till his mouth was wide open before she immersed him. 

 Add to these horrors the secret fear that she would lose hold 

 of him in what terror magnified into waves mountains high, and 

 the exhaustion consequent upon these mental agonies, and the 

 wonder is that any child of that bygone generation ever again 

 voluntarily entered water. Dreadful as the whole operation 

 undoubtedly was, imagination has probably intensified its 

 troubles, as years kindly erased from the memory its actual de- 

 tails ; but a sufficient residuum of horrors is left^to warn every 

 parent that he cannot too gently accustom his children, especi- 

 ally if they are at all nervous, to sea-bathing. It is incalculable 

 how mischievously the opposite course may act upon both their 

 bodily and mental faculties. 



Indeed, the influences of the seaside upon a child's mental 

 faculties, especially his imagination, can hardly be overstated. 

 If he be a genius, an embryo artist, poet, or novelist, the whole 

 of his inner being expands, like the anemones which lie, gravel- 



