'Opes 'ave faded one by one:
Th' w'isper'd words, so sweetly spoken,
Hall like faded flow'rs har gone.
Still that woice hin music lingers,
Loike er 'arp 'oose silver strings,
Softly swep' by fairy fingers,
Tell of hunforgotten things.
Nobody pays much attention to this wandering minstrel: he is happy if at the close of his song a penny finds its way into the battered hat he extends for largess. He is clearly a stranger to this part of the world, and has probably tramped down here from London by easy stages, and will have to tramp back again as he came, without much profit from his provincial tour.
The fashionable world which is sunning itself on the sands is made up, for the most part, of the usual types of a British watering-place—the pea-jacketed swell with blasé manner and one-eyed quizzing-glass; the occasional London cad in clothes of painful newness and exaggeration of style, such as no gentleman by any chance ever wears in Britain; the young sprig of nobility with effeminate face and "fast" inclinations, who smokes a cigarette and ogles the girls, and utters sentiments of profound ennui in a light boyish tenor voice. He is the son of an English nobleman who has a Welsh estate, upon which he passes a portion of his time, and can trace his lineage back to one of the Norman adventurers who came over with William the Conqueror. For an example of an older aristocracy than this, however, observe the ancient couple sitting near us in the shadow of a cliff-rock, the wife with a high-bridged nose and puffs of gray hair on her temples, the husband with an easy-fitting hat and a coat-collar which rolls so high as to give the impression he has no neck. These are aristocrats who, although untitled and owners only of a few modest acres back in Carmarthenshire, descend from ancestors that looked down on William the Conqueror as a plebeian upstart.