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Updated: May 7, 2025
But the German Ocean was bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with a tiny window too high up for him to look out of; undressing in the cold draughtiness and trying to hang up his clothes on pegs too high for him to reach; being tossed from side to side, and forward and backward, meanwhile, by the irregular jerking and swaying of the dismal contrivance, drawn by the amphibious horses of the region; until at last he hears the waves begin to dash against it, and it comes to a pause in a depth which he feels must be fathomless.
By seven o'clock pedestrians began to walk along the promenade, close buttoned against the blast; later, a single bathing-machine got under way, by means of a horse, and travelled forth seaward; but within what distance it finds the invisible margin I cannot say, at all events, it looks like a dreary journey. Just now I saw a sea-gull, wheeling on the blast, close in towards the promenade.
In a few minutes a heavier sea was raised than I had ever seen, and as it was directly ahead, the little brig, which was no better than a bathing-machine, plunged into it, and all the forward part of her was under water; the sea pouring in through the bow-ports and hawse-holes and over the knight-heads, threatening to wash everything overboard. In the lee scuppers it was up to a man's waist.
That long sweep of brick-work, the "Grand Promenade," bowed and bulged, with wall and window knuckled in and out, like wattles; the "Sea Parade" was a parade of sea; and a bathing-machine wheels upward lay, like a wrecked Noah's Ark, on the top of the "Saline-Silico-Calcareous Baths."
The heat rippled the blue air, and the sea, like an exhausted caged beast, licked the shingle. Sea-poppies bloomed under the wheels of a decaying bathing-machine, and Esther wondered. But the sea here was lonely as a prison, and, seeing the treeless coast with its chain of towns, her thoughts suddenly reverted to William.
Alfred Somers, once the youthful, picturesque as his own paintings, was now a middle-aged family man with spectacles spectacles worn, too, with the single object of seeing through them and a row of daughters tailing off to infancy, who at present added appreciably to the income of the bathing-machine women established along the sands. Mrs. Somers once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs.
The first time I walked down to the beach I was puzzled to make out some object rolling about in the low surf, which looked like a barrel, and which two bathing-machine men were watching with apparently the purpose of fishing it out.
The van inside was divided in two something after the manner of a bathing-machine, such as I daresay most children have often seen. The door in the middle was not locked, and Diana pushed it softly open; then, advancing with the light held high so as to show the children's faces without flaring painfully upon them, stood at one side and signed to the Signor to come forward.
Morgan, our signaliser, when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree; while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was the second cutter's snotty my snotty on the Archimandrite two years Cape Station.
Omnibuses convey you, if you please, from a convenient part of the town to the beach and back again; you have a clean and comfortable bathing-machine, dress, linen, and all appliances; and the charge for the whole is half-a- franc, or fivepence.
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