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!"

Oh, my best one! Such a simply sumptuous storyette for you! Even in your remote fastnesses you must have heard of young Ivan Rowdidowsky, the very very latest thing in Russian composer-pianists. Playing the piano with his elbows, dressed in scarlet velvet, and fuller of "inner meanings" than anyone (even from Russia) ever was before, he captured London at the beginning of the Little Season, and his vogue has been colossal. He gave twelve elbow-recitals of his own compositions at Emperor's Hall. Those fearsome interviewers fairly mobbed him, and he told them, in the prettiest broken English, that "piano playing with the hands suited well enough the pale-blooded law-abiding people of yesterday, but that the full-pulsing stormy emotions of to-day could only be adequately expressed by the elbows!" Quite myriads of people made him write, "Your affectionate friend, Ivan Rowdidowsky," in their autograph-books, till at last he had cramp in the hand and Sir William Kiddem had to be called in. There were reassuring bulletins telling the public that they needn't be alarmed about their favourite, as cramp in the band is rarely fatal and does not affect the elbows, and that, if M. Rowdidowsky stopped writing in autograph-books for a day or two, he'd be quite his wonderful self again.

Popsy, Lady Ramsgate, has been folle de lui from the first, and at Easter she'd a big party for him down at "Popsy's Pleasaunce," her place in Sussex, and then and there announced that she was engaged to him, and that after her marriage she would drop the Ramsgate title and be known by "her Ivan's beautiful Slavonic name!" People were very nice to her about it and didn't laugh more than they could help, and all went cheerily, Rowdidowsky in his scarlet velvet playing to them with his elbows every evening; and then one fatal morning (as novelists say) Popsy picked up a letter that her Ivan had dropped from his pocket. It was addressed outside to "M. Rowdidowsky," and this is an extract from what she read inside: "I was at your show at Emperor's Hall the other day and thought I should have split my skin at the way the silly jossers all round me were carrying on, and at the thought that it was my pal, good old Bert Smith of Camberwell, perched up on the platform in red velvet togs pounding away on the old piano with his elbows like a good 'un. I put my hands over my face to prevent myself from bursting out, and the woman next to me shoved a silver bottle under my nose and gurgled into my ear, 'You've an artist-soul! I felt just as you do when I first heard this divine Rowdidowsky!' The silly geeser! Go it, old son! More power to your elbows! And don't forget, when you've made your pile, that your old pal, Joe, was part-author of the idea and helped you to work it out!"

Popsy, poor old dear, is having the Gurra-Gurra treatment for nervous collapse. Lord and Lady Ramsgate are enormously relieved at the turn things have taken; and their boy Pegwell said to me yesterday, "I'm jolly glad it's all off! Fancy how decomposed it would have been to have Rumtidumsky, or whatever his name was, for a step-grandfather!"

Ever thine, Blanche.

OUR OVERBRED RACERS.