This is the season at which a great part of
the population of these islands faces, and once more fails to solve, the problem of how to get the sand off its feet before putting on its shoes and socks. If you are reading these words at the seaside you have, probably, only to lift your eyes to watch- their dilemma. Some have laved and shod one foot (a simple operation) and are now hopping madly up and down, trying to dry the other foot in mid-air and then insert it—still in mid-air—into the pendent sock. Others— perhaps taught by painful experience how many things can go wrong- with this' ambitious approach to the problem—are sitting far above high-water mark, laboriously transferring from their shins to their towels the several thousand extra particles with which their progress to a place of safety has coated their extremities. There is a solution to the problem. I came across it in a cove in West Africa where, as we prepared to dress, there suddenly materialised a squad of small black children who, causing us to sit down, poured sea-water out of beer-bottles over our feet, which did the trick nicely. Small white children could in many cases, I imagine, be trained to perform this useful rite.
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