rly concerning their roes. Then the couple
passed out of sight. Herrings were soon after this despatching their
odours through the chimneys of all Crikswich, and there was that much of
concord and festive union among the inhabitants.

The house on the beach had been posted where it stood, one supposes, for
the sake of the sea-view, from which it turned right about to face the
town across a patch of grass and salt scurf, looking like a square and
scornful corporal engaged in the perpetual review of an awkward squad of
recruits. Sea delighted it not, nor land either. Marine Parade fronting
it to the left, shaded sickly eyes, under a worn green verandah, from a
sun that rarely appeared, as the traducers of spinsters pretend those
virgins are ever keenly on their guard against him that cometh not. Belle
Vue Terrace stared out of lank glass panes without reserve, unashamed of
its yellow complexion. A gaping public-house, calling itself newly Hotel,
fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody
battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside
other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent
straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow
to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among
weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness,
featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed the outward
expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to come from
London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich to distract the
naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating brine to the
determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an appetite that
rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite of certain frank
whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the common to mingle
with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and gentleman entering
the town to take lodgings for a month, and that on the morrow they took a
boat from the shore, saying in their faint English to a sailor veteran of
the coastguard, whom they had consulted about the weather, "It is better
zis zan zat," as they shrugged between rough sea and corpselike land. And
they were not seen again. Their meaning none knew. Having paid their bill
at the lodging-house, their conduct was ascribed to systematic madness.
English people came to Crikswich for the pure salt sea air, and they did
not expect i