You are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six
weeks at some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along
think more than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do
when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one
more in the ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and
sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a "wharf of Lethe," by
which they rot "dull as the oozy weed." You foreknow your doom by
sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a
stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad
sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable reading of
the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun,
and probably have your umbrella stolen; a purposeless fine-weather sail
in a yacht, accompanied by many ineffectual attempts to catch a
mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your boys deafen
your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away at
innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die slowly; a sport which you
feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your
heart to stop, because "the lads have nothing else to do, and at all events
it keeps them out of the billiard-room;" and after all, and worst of all, at
night a soulless RECHAUFFE of third-rate London frivolity: this is
the life-in-death in which thousands spend the golden weeks of summer,
and in which you confess with a sigh that you are going to spend them.