The Argosy — page 299: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

280 On the South Coast. to the familiar scenes we have left behind—the barred windows and ghost-haunted rooms and beloved sanctums ? And for what end, aim, or reward? ‘I suppose you have nothing in the world to do?” remarked a frend last October to a worthy fésculapius. ‘‘Indeed!” he returned. ‘‘I am more busy than ever. My patients are all coming back from the sea, and of course they are all coming back ill. It 1s always so.” One friend dates his letters from No. 1, Sophronia Terrace, Babing- ton-Super-Mare, and another from No. 99, Alleluia Crescent, Babineg- ton-Super-Mud. ‘There is a despondent tone in both these epistles, and the pictures that rise up in the mind’s eye are identically the same and conventionally correct. If we happen to be at home at the time, our hearts go out in compassion to our correspondents ; and if we, too, have taken flight in like manner, to compassion we add sympathy. Not only in the sense of error, but in that of suffering also, we are all “miserable sinners.” All this is very different at Bournemouth. There is a dignity about it and a repose, evidently made to command respect, if not admiration. ‘There is the nucleus of the actual town itself, with its up-and-down-hill streets, whose rows of houses and terraces of shops must have some sort of resemblance to other rows of houses and terraces of shops in other towns. Nothing so much resembles a cat looking in at a window as a cat looking out at a window. But the town is on the lower slopes, hiding its diminished business-head from the aristocratic heights: and Bournemouth proper extends to these heights, and seems to have no bounds—so much are they building round and about, far and near. The houses are all more or less pretentious (I use the word in its literal, not its unpleasant sense), and probably more or less agreeable to inhabit. And if the names of many displayed on the gates are an index to the interiors, not a few must be very grand and dignified, if not gorgeous and glittering. Some of the names were secular, others religious. In juxtaposition with ‘“‘Grosvenor” and “ Belgravia,” ‘“ Heart’s Delight” and ‘Mount Vernon,” one found ‘‘ Beersheba ” and ‘‘ Jericho,” ‘‘ Jerusalem ” and ‘‘ Madagascar”—not that the latter, as far as I am aware, has any religious signification, unless it be as a missionary station. Simply the names; such commonplace appendages as House or Villa were usually omitted ; Cotéage I am sure was unknown. At length, during a contemplative drive, in which I was unable to disagree with my company for the reason tnat I had none, I came all at once upon the words “ Beelzebub Lodge,” in large capitals upon a swing gate. This was quite too much. Surely here lived the parents of that blessed infant who was brought by them into church one Sunday afternoon to my friend X., and insisted upon his christening the child Beelzebub—and never forgave him for taking the law into his own hands, and giving it the honest name of John. More shocked and Gomicbooks (C(@)