many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets
a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of
fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the
street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another
shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the London
_Journal_, dear to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels,
dear for their suggestive names: such, as well as memory serves me,
were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive, posted
on a split between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with
villas--enough for the boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents,
not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a haven in the
rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets: to the left,
endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive
with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of
seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty
and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between--now charmed
into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with
bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent
of the sea--in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward.

[Footnote 65: From "Across the Plains With Other Memories and Essays."
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner's Sons.]

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in
that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you
wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete
yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all
mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there
by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites.
To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art
of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbor there; and you
might have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths
with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again,
you might join our fishing parties, where we sat perched as thick as
solan geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl, angling over
each other's head, to the much entanglement of lines and loss of
podleys and consequent shrill recrimination--shrill as the geese
themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might hav