passed through them at an
amazing speed. His natural gait on shipboard was a kind of
anapaestic dance--two short steps and a long--and though the crowd
interrupted its cadence and coerced him to a quick bobbing motion, as
of a bottle in a choppy sea, it hardly affected his pace. Here and
there he snapped out a greeting to some ship's captain or townsman of
his acquaintance, or growled testily at a row of soldiers bearing
down on him three abreast. His angry green eyes seemed to clear a
path before him, in spite of the grins which his hump and shambling
legs excited among strangers. In this way he darted along High
Street, turned up by the markets, crossed Church Street into West
Street, and passed under the great gate by which the London Road left
the town.

Beyond this gate the road ran through a tall ravelin and out upon a
breezy peninsula between the river and the open sea. And here
Captain Barker halted and, tugging off hat and wig, wiped his crown
with a silk handkerchief.

Over the reedy marsh upon his right, where a windmill waved its lazy
arms, a score of larks were singing. To his left the gulls mewed
across the cliffs and the remoter sandbanks that thrust up their
yellow ridges under the ebb-tide. The hum of the little town sounded
drowsily behind him.

He gazed across the sandbanks upon the blue leagues of sea, and
rubbed his fingers softly up and down the unshaven side of his face.

"H'm," he said, and then "p'sh!" and then "p'sh!" again; and, as if
this settled it, readjusted his wig and hat and set off down the road
faster than ever.

A cluster of stunted poplars appeared in the distance, and a long
thatched house; then, between the trees, the eye caught sight of two
other buildings, exactly alike, but of a curious shape and colour.
Imagine two round towers, each about forty feet in height, daubed
with a bright blue wash and surmounted with a high-pitched, conical
roof of a somewhat darker tint. Above each roof a gilt vane
glittered, and a flock of white pigeons circled overhead or,
alighting, dotted the tiles with patches of silver.

A bend of the road broke up this cluster of trees and buildings.
The long thatched house fell upon the left of the highway, and in
front of it a sign-post sprang into view, with a drinking-trough
below. Directly opposite, the two blue roofs ranged themselves side
by side, with long strips of garden and a thick privet hedge between
them and the road. And be