James Thomson.

Since I met the Lancashire excursionist at Lowestoft I have been wondering what is the essential distinction between the Cockney-tripper and the holiday-maker one meets at New Brighton, Douglas, or Blackpool.

We were tightly packed in the shelter on the promenade waiting the end of the thunderstorm. There were two native boys singing a temperance song to the tune of "There's nae luck aboot the hoose," translated to a dirge with a drawling refrain of "No d-r-r-rink! no d-r-r-rink for me!"

This they would whisperingly sing, with stealthy inquiring glances at the people who pressed about them, and then hysterically giggle. But the stolid, respectable crowd of "visitors" from London, stiff with the recent dignity of seeing their names printed in the visitors' list (with "Esquire" at the end!) would not stoop to notice these frivolous ebullitions. They stolidly glowered with heavy impassive glare, oblivious, it seemed, not only of the boys, but also of each other.

Now this starchiness would not have been remarkable in Southport or Folkestone, where one meets so many pompous, old, superior persons, puffed up with the importance of their little pension, annuity, or snug, retiring hoard; nor in Scarborough, where many visitors are genuine "toffs," and naturally privileged to look down upon the common herd.

But this crowd at Lowestoft consisted unmistakably of the genteel working class—the clerks at £150 to £300 a year, the small shopkeepers, the—in short, the genteel working class.

In Lancashire this class, though disposed to a sort of blunt arrogance at home, become humanised when holiday-making. They will condescend to fuse with their "inferiors," and when united, as in this case, by common misfortune, they will even condescend to be affable.

Not so the genteel workman of Cockaigne.

That he is a workman he never remembers; that he is genteel he never forgets.

Even when he has divested himself of his customary frock-coat and tall silk hat, he remains still clothed with his cumbrous and sombre gentility. It is to him as valour was to his forebears. It serves him in lieu of honour or religion. His gentility is of his possessions the most sacred: rather than that, he would lose his honesty, his manliness, and his humanity.

The silence was broken by the irruption of a bustling newcomer, who, as he shook his dripping cap, cheerily cried, "Good Laur! it does come down!"

He looked round for acknowledgment, but the genteel gentlemen from London stonily stared into vacancy.

Undiscouraged, the newcomer took off his mackintosh, offered a jest about the weather, beamed cordially upon the crowd, and playfully cuffed the ears of the boy who demanded, "No d-r-r-rink, no d-r-r-rink for me."

"All right," he said, "if you don't want any drink, you needn't cry about it. I'll take your share when the whisky comes."

Again he glanced round with an inviting smile, but the petrified images looked remote, unfriendly, melancholy, slow.

But this chilliness troubled him no more than a frosty morning troubles the jovial sun. He beamed and glowed and laughed and talked, and, despite themselves, the genteel glaciers thawed.

"That man," I said to myself, "comes from the North."

His next speech told of storms he had seen—at Blackpool! of seas washing over the promenade wetting him "three streets back."

One of the gentlemen from London cast a look of curiosity.

The man from the North went on to tell how he had taken a day's sail from Blackpool, and, being unable to land there at night, had been carried to Fleetwood, and thence back by rail after midnight.

"How was that?" asked the gentleman who had looked interested; "haven't they a pier at Blackpool?"

Fancy that to a Blackpoolite! It was as if one had asked a sailor whether he had ever seen the sea, a Scotch reporter whether he had tasted whisky, a French soldier whether he had ever heard the "Marseillaise," or a Southport man whether he knew what sand was.

It did my heart good in that strange land upon that cheerless day to hear the man from the North pour out his volcanic eloquence in Blackpool's praise.

I grieve to be compelled to admit that some of his statements struck me as inaccurate. For instance, I thought he was wrong in describing the promenade as ten miles long, and I think he was not justified in stretching the Tower to double the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

I cast a glance of mild rebuke upon him when he added that the Winter Gardens were "something like the Crystal Palace, and Earl's Court put together," and I gasped when he represented Uncle Tom's Cabin as "a sort of shandygaff of Buckingham Palace and Olympia!".

I felt that if I didn't check him the man would rupture himself.

I touched him on the shoulder. "I have lived at Blackpool myself," I said.

"There you are," he continued, without turning a hair; "this gentleman will confirm what I'm telling you. Aren't all these South of England watering-places slow as compared with Blackpool?"

"Well," I said, "none of them have such variety of amusements."

"If you want amusement," said the Cockney gentleman who had offered the cue about the pier, "if you want amusement, you should try Yarmouth."

"Yarmouth!" cried the North of England man, with an expression of superb disdain. "Bah! Yarmouth is vulgar!"

It was lovely! After his praise of Blackpool it was sublime. I saluted him respectfully and departed with a soul full of awe.

For I had not then seen Yarmouth. On the next day I did.

Then my wonder vanished.

I had seen something of the Yarmouth yahoos at Gorleston.

For the democratic price of twopence, steamers bring them up the river, past the teeming wharves and shipbuilding yards of the Yare, and belch them forth to stare upon Gorleston's "slowness."

Our placid Gorleston sun smiled on their hurry and pain with its customary calm complacency. Our lazy Gorleston sea rocked itself benignly with its usual hushing swish. Our deliberate Gorleston sea-gulls indolently flapped their wings.

And the Yarmouth yahoos yawned and hastened away in disgust.

But at Yarmouth, their feet are, as it were, upon their own wicket; their deportment was to the manner born.

See them shying at skittles or cocoanuts, gorging on stout and shellfish, bustling, breathless but roaring, from "entertainment" to "entertainment." How hot they look! how they perspire! and how they shout! Do they really amuse themselves? I wonder.

They all seek happiness, these good brothers and sisters of ours; but surely they run away from it that so distress themselves in its pursuit. To "get on," to "do" the utmost possible in the shortest possible time, to eclipse their fellows, to make haste and yet more haste, and ever more haste—that, in pleasure as in toil, is ever their aim.

For a right-down, regular, blaring, flaring, glaring, tearing, staring, devil-may-caring hullabaloo, Blackpool on August Bank Holiday is peculiar.

But between the Lancashire and the Cockney-tripper there is an essential difference which is not in the Southerner's favour.

The Northern tripper may be rowdy, but there is a redeeming quality of broad joviality, good-tempered companionship in his razzling, that mellows and softens its asperity. But the Cockney-tripper, from his exasperating accent to his infuriating concertina, is aggressively, blatantly, harshly coarse. There is a self-sufficient "cockiness" about him that soars above all compromise and defers to nothing and to nobody. His profanity is more raucous and vicious than the Northerner's, his ebriety more ribald, brutal, and swinish. Armed with his customary concertina, or his still more harrowing occasional cornet, 'Arry is a terror to shudder at.

His 'Arriet, too, is infinitely coarser than the worst specimen of the Lancashire mill-girl.

The shrieking sisterhood of the flaunting feathers and marvellously beaded and bugled tippets, swagger along in serried bands, five and six feet deep. Arm in arm they come, lifting their skirts high in impudent dance as they lurch to and fro, giggling hysterically, and shouting vocal inanities with shrill and piercing insistence.

There is nothing more distressing in all England than the spectacle of these unfortunate persons in their hours of mirth. In all England there is no poverty more pitiful than the conspicuous poverty of their resources of pleasure.

To raise as much noise as they can, to make themselves as offensive as possible to the quietly disposed, to spoil natural beauties and break things,—these seem to be the aims of their enjoyment.

If they find a pleasant stretch of clean sand, where barefooted children happily disport themselves, they will fill the place with lurid profanity, and departing leave behind them a Tom Tiddler's heap of broken bottles, threatening the security and comfort of every playing baby in the neighbourhood. If they find a pretty flower-garden, where they are politely requested to "keep off the grass," they will deliberately and purposely trample on the sequestered patch, to prove their insolent superiority over regulations framed for their and the general public's profit and advantage.

Oh, but it is sad to see! There is nothing more depressing, more crushing to one's aspirations for the people's greater and truer liberty.

The usurer's greed, the tyranny of upstart wealth, labour's subjection and dependence, poverty's hunger—all these may be cured; but what shall be done with yahoos whose chief delight lies in spoiling the enjoyment of others?

Ah, me! I wish I had not been to Yarmouth.