What is, however, peculiar to Scheveningen is its expanse of
sand covered with sentry-box wicker chairs. To stand on the pier on a
fine day in the season and look down on these thousands of chairs and
people is to receive an impression of insect-like activity that I think
cannot be equalled. Immovable as they are, the chairs seem to add to
the restlessness of the seething mass. What a visitor from Mars would
make of it is a mystery; but he could hardly fail to connect chair
and occupant. Here, he would say, is surely the abode of giant snails!
On a windy day the chairs must be of great use; but in heat they
seem to me too vertical and too hard. One must, however, either sit
in them or lie upon sand. There is not a pebble on the whole coast:
indeed there is not a pebble in Holland. Life after lying upon sand
can become to some of us a burden almost too difficult to bear;
but the Dutch holiday-maker does not seem to find it so. As for the
children, they are truly in Paradise. There can be no sand better
to dig in than that of Scheveningen; and they dig in it all day. A
favourite game seems to be to surround the parental sentry-boxes with
a fosse. Every family has its castle, and every castle its moat.
I have been twice to Scheveningen, and on each occasion I acquired
beneath its glittering magnitude a sense of depression.
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