"The defendants were ordered to pay the costs, but the Chairman (Mr. T. J. Price) remarked that if such breeches were repeated the magistrates would have to adopt sterner measures."—South Wales Daily News.
We hope this will be a warning to our nuts.
BLANCHE'S LETTERS.
Week-End-on-Sea.
Park Lane.
Dearest Daphne,—I've been doing Easter with the Clackmannans and helping them with an idea they're carrying out. There's a little coast town on their Southshire property (Shrimpington it's been called up to now), and they're turning it into a seaside place that people can go to! Isn't that dilly? Of course, our coasts quite bristle with seaside towns, but they're places people can't go to because everybody goes there. And so the Clackmannans are going to supply a long-felt want, as old-fashioned people say, and give us a ville de bains of our very very own. Its name is to be changed from Shrimpington to Week-End-on-Sea. It has no railway station, which, of course, is a great merit; it's not to have any big blatant hotels or pensions—nothing but charming bungalow-cottages; there'll be no pier, no band, none of those banal winter-gardens and impossible pleasure palaces that ces autres delight in, and, of course, none of those immensely fearful concert parties and pierrots. But we shall have a troupe of mermen and mermaids who will do classic gambols by the marge of the sea and play on pipes or shells or whatever it is that sea-creatures play on. There'll be bathing parties, when the last syllable of the last word in bathing-kit will be seen; paddling parties, in carefully thought out toilettes pour marcher dans l'eau, and shell-gathering parties. Stella Clackmannan, who has such an active brain that everyone's quite anxious about her, is going to have tons of really pretty shells laid along a part of the beach (above high water), and people will go shell-gathering en habit coquilleux.
The only feature Week-End-on-Sea will have in common with other seaside places is a parade. At first Stella wouldn't hear of having one; but Norty told her there's "a deep-seated primal instinct in human nature for sitting on benches and watching one's fellow-creatures walk up and down, and it would not be wise to thwart this instinct." He's an enormously clever boy, and, when it was put to her like that, Stella gave in. So there's to be a parade on the sea front, and Ray Rymington, whose sense of the beautiful is absolutely, will see after it. There'll be none of those ghastly glass shelters, but just darling Sheraton benches at intervals, and the paraders will be carefully censored. Nobody who hasn't something of a profile will be allowed to walk up and down—and no woman who takes more than 4's in slices or who's wearing a last year's sleeve. So you see, dearest, it will be quite a cachet, both of person and style, to be seen walking on the parade at our watering-place. The Bullyon-Boundermere woman met Stella in town the other day and said, "My dear duchess, how can we thank you for at last giving us a really classy seaside place?" "What a wonderful word, Mrs. Boundermere!" answered Stella. "'Classy'! Do tell me what it means!"