love it all my
days; not so much for these its monuments, but for itself, its
curiously sleepy air of disinterested quiet, its strong dislike of any
sort of enthusiasm, its English boredom, even of itself, its complete
surrender to what is, its indifference to what might be. May it ever
remain secure within sight of the hills, within sight of the sea,
steeped in the Tudor myth, certain in its English heart, that twice two
is not four but anything one likes to make it, nor ever hear ribald
voices calling upon it to decide what after all it stands for in the
world, denying it any longer the consolation it loves best of finding
in the conclusion what is not in the premises, or, as the vulgar might
put it, of having its cake and eating it too.

CHAPTER XVI

SELSEY, BOSHAM AND PORCHESTER

It was my good fortune, while I was in Chichester, to be tempted to
explore the peninsula of Selsey, which most authorities declare to have
no beauty and little interest for the traveller to-day. For St
Wilfrid's sake, I put aside these admonishments, and one morning set
out upon the lonely road to Pagham, across a country as flat as a fen,
of old, as they say, a forest, the forest of Mainwood, and still in
spite of drainage and cultivation very bleak and lonely with marshes
here and there which are still the haunt of all kinds of wild-fowl.

It is only to the man who finds pleasure in the Somerset moors, the
fens of Cambridgeshire or the emptiness of Romney Marsh that this
corner of England will appeal, but to such an one it is full of
interest and certainly not without beauty. Pagham, however, of which I
had read, with its creek and harbour, its curious Hushing Well, its
golden sands, and extraordinary melancholy, as it were a ruin of the
sea, sadly disappointed me. Only its melancholy remains. Its harbour,
where of old we read the sea-fowl were to be seen in innumerable
flocks, and the whole place was musical with the cry of the wild-swan,
has been wholly reclaimed, and the famous Hushing Well no longer exists
at all. This last was a curious natural phenomenon and must have been
worth seeing. It consisted apparently of a great pool in the sea, one
hundred and thirty feet long by thirty feet broad, boiling and bubbling
and booming all day long. This was caused, it is said, by the air
rushing through a bed of shingle beneath which was a vast cavern from
which the sea continuously expelled the air as it rushed in. Nothing of
th