After the Rip Van Winkle premiere, I came to Brighton on the rainiest Sunday But even the. rain} could not rob the air of a certain amount of bracing quality.
I have mentioned a few extra good American hotels, but I am free to say no hotel in America is better, few equal to the Hotel Metropole here in this ideal seaside resort. Gordon Hotels, Limited, have so many fine establishments I wonder they don't try one in Shanghai. They have a Metropole in London, Monte Carlo and Cannes. But of all their houses the one at Brighton most appeals to me. It faces the south and the sea; it is absolutely fire proof; the rooms are large and beautifully furnished and appointed, and the servants are most attentive and ofa superior class. As I write Took over an expanse of sea glistening in the sun, The waves come crooningly up like a caress, with that musical swish of sound like no other sound in nature, and oh so soothing. The West Pier stretches far out in the water, a most delightful promenade, where bands of music play three or four times a day, boats start on short sea trips, little boys fish from the end of the Pier, and in the music pavilion much really excellent vocal music and plays may be daily heard in the summer or winter season. The latter is the fashionable season in Brighton. All winter when there is any sun to be seen in England, it.is here one sees it. Summer is the popular season—the Bohemian time in Brighton. We are now on the edge of both seasons, for a second summer, an "Indian suumer" as they say in America, is reigning this September tide. It is St, Martin's summer in English vernacular, I presume. I never tire of parading up and down the Pier. I always put my penny in one of the fortune-telling slots, and learn by card, that "I am destined to do great things" or that I "will wink the other eye before nightfall, and live to be 75." Well, we most of us believe in the superaturaln even at a penny a "go." After all, there are no such marvellous fortunetellers in the world, I think, as the Chinese.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.