e Rivers Arne and Wilner, after crossing the tide-flats and
salt-marsh of Marychurch Haven, make their swift united exit into
Marychurch Bay. Neither was he troubled by the fact that Tandy's
Castle--or more briefly and familiarly Tandy's--for all its commonplace
outward decency of aspect did not enjoy an unblemished moral or social
reputation. The house--a whitewashed, featureless erection--was planted
at right angles to the deep sandy lane leading up from the shore, through
the scattered village of Deadham, to the three-mile distant market town
of Marychurch.

Standing on a piece of rough land--bare, save for a few stunted Weymouth
pines, and a fringe of tamarisk along the broken sea-wall--Tandy's, at
the date in question, boasted a couple of bowed sash-windows on either
side the front and back doors; and a range of five other windows set flat
in the wall on the first floor. There was no second storey. The slate
roofs were mean, low-pitched, without any grace of overshadowing eaves.
At either end, a tall chimney-stack rose like the long ears of some
startled, vacant-faced small animal. Behind the house, a thick plantation
of beech and sycamore served to make its square blank whiteness visible
for a quite considerable distance out to sea. Built upon the site of some
older and larger structure, it was blessed--or otherwise--with a system
of vaults and cellars wholly disproportionate to its existing size. One
of these, by means of a roughly ceiled and flagged passage, gave access
to a heavy door in the sea-wall opening directly on to the river
foreshore.

Hence the unsavoury reputation of the place. For not only did it supply a
convenient receiving house for smuggled goods, but a convenient
rendezvous for the more lawless characters of the neighbourhood--a
back-of-beyond and No Man's Land where the devil could, with impunity,
have things very much his own way. In the intervals of more serious
business, the vaults and cellars of Tandy's frequently resounded to the
agonies and brutal hilarities of cock-fights, dog-fights, and other
repulsive sports and pastimes common to the English--both gentle and
simple--of that virile but singularly gross and callous age. Nevertheless
to Thomas Clarkson Verity, man of peace and of ideas, Tandy's
represented--and continued to represent through over half a
century--rescue, security, an awakening in something little short of
paradise from a long-drawn nightmare of hell. He paid an extorti