belong to London companies, the faces | especially for the delectation of his own and dresses have become familiar in the class. Strand or Piccadilly, and the Cockney But though practically incorporated dialect, with its soft drawl and misused with it, Brighton is fifty miles away from aspirates, is heard oftener than any other. the city, and lying between the two are Like London, too, its social life is sustain- undulating English landscapes with many ed by many classes circulating in a gen- shady lanes and ancient villages, through eral current, but never affiliating, and which the train flies when it is once bewhile in one quarter coronets are no rari-yond the spacious limits of London. Unty, and a prince leads society, in another der the Box Hill Tunnel, which is the the excursionist of a day, or the tradesman spending a two-weeks' holiday, smokes his brier or cutty and eats his shrimps with out feeling the disparity, and without realizing that Brighton was not made

scene of a story by Charles Reade, and has often done service in fiction, over the lofty spans of the Seven Bridges, through deep and friable cuttings of chalk and limestone-this is the way to London

by-the-Sea; and as we come nearer to it the land is hillier, the foliage less abundant, and flocks of sheep are seen fattening on the nutritious grasses of the breezy South Downs.

on one side of the artery, and down on the other, which usually mislead any one unacquainted with their sinuosities, and in between are many small alleys and courts, a few feet wide, which, enticing the stranger into them by their air of mystery and antiquity, or appealing to his sense of the picturesque by their peaked gables, galleried fronts, scarlet tiles, and clustered chimney-pots, involve him in a labyrinth of old shops and old houses, to extricate himself from which is nearly as easy as a Chinese puzzle. This is in the heart of Brighton, and these old byways were serviceable to those who knew them long before London had appropriated and reconstructed the fishing village for its recreation. There are second stories overlapping first stories, and dormer windows, like hooded sun-bonnets, on the sunken roofs. A favorite style of architecture is a plaster surface to the walls, with stones as large as a man's foot imbedded in it for ornament; and the same sort of stones is used in the pavement, which slopes into an open gutter. Neither in the main streets nor in the complicated tributaries are there any distinguishing signs of a watering-place; the "local atmosphere" is singularly uncharfly-acteristic; excursionists stare into the shop windows, and crowd the sidewalks, and for all that is obvious to the contrary, we might be in some country town on market-day.

What sort of a place is it where the big metropolis airs itself? There are so few who have not seen it, and made up their minds about it, that any one with a first impression to record has something out of the common; it is one of the sights, like Westminster Abbey and the Tower, which every Englishman feels it incumbent upon him to include in his experience, and among all the passengers we alone, apparently, are entering the unknown. Visions of what it will be like follow each other in our expectations, and when, with a precursory screech, the engine flashes it upon us, it is wholly different from anything we have imagined. Any one with definite information who could correctly picture Brighton to himself in advance of seeing it would be more fortunate in his power of divination than reasonable in his conjecture. In that part where the dépôt is, its appearance is so unlike what anticipation has made it that it provokes a smile. No sea is visible, no fine houses, no massive hotels, no wide streets. The colder and stronger air and the mists ing overhead give some assurance that the sea is not far away, but we walk a mile or more before we hear it falling on the shingly beach with a sharp, reiterated hiss. Looking to the east from the train as it Eventually, however, we reach the botenters the terminus, we see a compact re-tom of the hill, and there before us lies gion of houses, with a pale drab effect, the sea, chafing against a long, narrow, apparently built in terraces, which in the and pebbly beach, with nothing between twilight seem like the benches of an im- it and the horizon. There is a masonry mense amphitheatre, and leaving the dé- wall all along the water-front, extending pôt, we come out on a hilly and narrow from which are many sloping jetties to street, with a preponderating number of prevent the encroachment of currents. economical restaurants and taverns, whose which before now have eaten away good tariffs are profusely displayed in the win- slices of the town. The jetties divide the dows and at the doors. Most of the build- beach into sections, and the sections are of ings are old, and many of them have varying levels, the pebbles having been bulging fronts and bay or oriel windows; heaped up several feet higher in some the common material is brick or stucco, than in others. From the sea-wall inand when it is the latter, it is painted the ward is an excellent macadamized road, customary drab, which in some praise- an ample promenade, and spaces of grass, worthy instances is substituted by a less flowers, and shrubbery, fronting upon objectionable lemon-color. The eating which is a continuous line of buildings, houses divide the occupation of the street forming a street over three miles long, with small shops of all sorts, wine and without a sign of shabbiness from end to liquor vaults, and some boarding-houses end. There are modern hotels six and with cards in the windows announcing seven stories high, old-fashioned taverns apartments to let. Branching from it with bay-windows and an air of fastidiare other winding streets, going up hill ous cleanliness, rows of dwelling-houses

time.

which it is not extravagant to call pala- | are things which must excite the wonder tial, handsome shops with costly displays of any one who sees them for the first in the windows, and bathing establishments scarcely smaller than the largest hotels. Toward the western end the parapet is from six to sixteen feet above the beach, the town being built up from it in a lateral valley. Farther east the street curves up a cliff, with a smooth and white escarpment, where it is over sixty feet above the level of the beach. Here and there the street debouches into a crescent or square of luxurious dwelling-houses, with inclosed parks and gardens. The architecture is that of Mayfair and Belgravia. The aquarium is built under the cliff, and its picturesque clock tower and arched entrance are practically all of it that is above-ground. It is an enchanted domain below, where in crepuscular avenues the silent and lithe creatures of the deep come and stare and gasp at us with stoic unconcern, and seem to dissolve in the water that contains them. An hour in the aquarium will supply all the accessories of nightmare for a month: we have been thrice devoured by a lobster with eyes like black globular beads; the scallops have danced to our whistling in uneasy dreams; and a sturgeon has haunted us with the demonaic pertinacity of De Quincey's Malay.

Brighton is not busy for a few summer months only, and then left to the gales, the fishermen, and the coast - guard. Though the fashionable season does not begin until late in September or early in October, the excursionists crowd it from the early summer until late in the year. From August to December the climate is most salubrious-warm, elastic, and bracing. An east wind keeps visitors away in the first months of the year, and the place is then deserted except by a mere handful of people-about one hundred and four thousand-who constitute the resident population.

The history of this village runs through a good many centuries, and introduces not a few interesting persons. Thackeray has said that George the Fourth invented Brighton, and in one sense this pre-eminent blackguard of a prince developed it by giving it his royal patronage; but to say nothing of the Romans, who have left their foot-prints and some other things in the neighborhood, it was the scene of several historic episodes long before the dissipated Hanoverian's time. On the night of October 14, 1651, a tall, swarthy young man with a companion slipped into the George Inn and said he would wait to meet a sea-faring acquaintance. In earlier days the host had been employed in one of the London palaces, and he recognized in his seedy visitor Prince Charles, son of the monarch who more than two years before had been beheaded at Whitehall. After the battle of Worcester the young king had experienced many adventures, and worn many disguises; there was a price upon his head; but the innkeeper, either from loyalty or discretion, did not offer to molest the fugitive or his companion. The captain of a collier, Nicholas Tettersell, then appeared, and took Charles and his companion, who was the Earl of Rochester, on board his vessel, and landed them

It is to be remembered that with the exception of the crescents and squares and intersecting streets, there is no break in the three miles of buildings which abut on the sea; the houses, shops, baths, and hotels are set together without any unoccupied lots between them. But to fully comprehend the extent of Brighton, one should go out on the pier, and then the place may be seen in its complex and substantial entirety. Compared to it, the most crowded American watering-placeConey Island, Atlantic City, or Long Branch is nothing more than a camp. It is veritably, and not in any fancifulness of nomenclature, a city by the seaa city modelled on London, and having the structural permanency of the metrop-in France, for which service many things olis. It is not built on the banks of a river, nor at the head of a gulf, nor in the shelter of a bay. It is immediately on the coast; the chalk cliffs, with their grassy summits, are at either side of it, and the water is never more than a few yards from the esplanade. The solidity and compactness of the frontage of buildings, and the heights covered with houses,

were promised. The Restoration came, but none of the gifts, and Tettersell therefore sailed into the Thames and moored off Whitehall, where his dingy bark attracted the attention of the king, who, being thus reminded, gave the captain a ring, a perpetual annuity of £100 a year, and took the collier into the navy under the name of the Lucky Escape.