It was late in the hot afternoon, when we came into Bournemouth, through what seemed to us miles of suburban roads and endless rows of stucco villas. This is what Mr. Stevenson calls “the uncharted wilderness of Bournemouth,” and, indeed, we found the phrase happy and the place not at all to our liking. From what we saw of the famed pine-woods we were not impressed with them; gaunt battalions of tall trees, bare as scaffold-poles and as straight, with never a branch nor sign of foliage within a matter of forty feet from the ground, and that ground covered with a frowzy matting of husky, colourless fir-spines—a Bournemouth pine-wood is a depressing place.

If Bournemouth had been invented when the era of the Interesting Invalid was yet with us, I can conceive how grand a site it would have been for the novelist’s plots (plots, that is to say, in a technical sense, for under no circumstances could one imagine robustious plottings and deeds of derring-do at Bournemouth). Building-plots are Bournemouth’s nearest approach to the romantic. Languorous romances of the fading-away-in-the-twilight order would have been written with an anÆmic heroine effectively displayed against a striking background of whispering fir-trees, and—but you all know that sort of thing!

But this was not to be. Long before Bournemouth had sprung into importance, the Interesting Invalid had grown unfashionable, and there reigned in her stead the robust young woman of fine Du Maurieresque physique, and energetic, not to say athletic and slangy habits. Bournemouth, truly, is thronged with invalids, but not chiefly with the interesting variety: that sort went out with the crinoline. Here the Bath Chair is the most familiar object of the sea-shore, and the mild and offensively inoffensive chair-man has attained in his numbers the dignity of a class.

But not only invalids hie them to the neighbourhood of these frowzy firs, these yellow sands. Bournemouth, one is tempted to say, is the watering-place par excellence of the curate. There is a certain respectable air of five-o’clock tea and a savour of muffins about the place, that traditionally accompany the unbeneficed. Bournemouth abominates the tripper whose pockets ring with plebeian silver, whose trips are calculated in hours, and so with the recurrence of statutory holidays, Bournemouth shivers at the sounds of vulgar revelry heard by the sounding sea. Truth to tell, however, the jolly Bank-holiday crew are never too prominent here: lordly expresses are the salient feature of the railway service and hotels of an appalling magnificence affright the shallow pursed. Otherwhere, sandy foreshores are filled, thronged, with trippers, cheap and checked with checks of Tweed gone mad; with photographic ninepenny-touchers, gay again in that the automatic cloud has passed away from their horizon; with longshoremen, gruff of voice and broad in the beam, redolent of spirits, who confide to your unwilling ear the secret of the day being “fine for a sail, sir;” with hateful brats intent on constructing masked pitfalls for the stout and elderly of either gender; with children’s missionising preachers with their excruciating harmoniums; raucous-voiced burnt-corkists, tract-distributors and hurdy-gurds. Here, to the contrary, are few of these pests. Certainly there be occasionally, as at prim and proper Hastings, the children’s services, that give an air of cheap and superficial piety to the scene; and liliputian pails and spades are continually at work on the sands; but moneyed holiday-makers, either leisured or (in two senses) pursy business men of the Saturday to Monday variety are among the chief of Bournemouth’s clientÈle. I met Wellesley Welles the other day in, let me see where was it? Oh, yes, Capel Court. He was going to flee for a space the gilded baseness of the Stock Exchange for a three weeks’ trip to Homburg, and to that end had accumulated a prodigious heap of red-covered encyclopÆdias of travel, and spouted guide-bookese until the brain whirled again with the sound and volume of it. Yet Bournemouth claimed him as its own for many week-ends. Indeed, Saturday to Monday Bournemouth is peculiarly knowing in contangos and options, and has a keen eye on the money article in its morning paper.