Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/145

Rh teaches the lady to float, which, however, is not a thing to be despised in case of shipwreck.

Very various are the scenes which on all sides present themselves in the bathing-republic. Here a young, handsome couple, in elegant bathing attire, go dancing out into the wild waves holding each other by the hand, and full of the joy and the courage of life, ready to meet anything, the great world's sea and all its billows! There again is an elderly couple in grey garments holding each other steadily by the two hands, and popping up and down in the waves, just as people dip candles, with solemn aspects and merely observant to keep their footing, and doing all for the benefit of health. Here is a young, smiling mother, bearing before her her little, beautiful boy, a naked Cupid, not yet a year old, who laughs and claps his little hands for joy as the wild waves dash over him. Just by is a fat grandmother with a life-preserver round her body, and half sitting on the sands in evident fear of being drowned for all that, and when the waves come rolling onward catching hold of some of her leaping and laughing great children and grandchildren who dance around her. Here a graceful young girl who now, for the first time, bathes in the sea, flies before the waves into the arms of father or mother, in whose embrace it may dash over her; there is a groupe of wild young women holding each other by the hand, dancing around and screaming aloud every time a wave dashes over their heads, and there in front of them is a yet wilder swarm of young men, who dive and plunge about like fishes, much to the amazement of the porpoises (as I presume) who, here and there, pop their huge heads out of the billows, but which again disappear as a couple of large dogs rush forward through the water towards them in the hope of a good prize. Sometimes when one expects a wave to come dashing over one, it brings with it a great force of ladies and gentlemen, whom it has borne along with it, and one has then to take care