nd a
bend of the road. Its bequest of dust and smoke was quickly spent by a
prodigal young breeze. Landscape and seascape were reindued with their
full amenities. Ruskin would have been pleased. So indeed was I; but
that railway-car (in which, it romantically struck me, I myself might
once, might frequently, have travelled) was still upmost in my brooding
mind. To what manner of wretched end was it destined? No end would
have seemed bad enough for it to Ruskin. But I was born late enough to
acquiesce in railways and in all that pertains to them. And now, since
the success of motor-cars (those far greater, because unrestricted,
bores), railways have taken on for me some such charm as the memory
of the posting coaches had for the greybeards of my boyhood, some such
charm as aeroplanes may in the fulness of time foist down for us on
motor-cars. 'But I rove,' like Sir Thomas More. And I seem to think that
a cheap literary allusion will make you excuse that vice. To resume my
breathless narrative I decided that I would slowly follow the tracks of
the lorry.

I supposed that these were leading me to some great scrapping-place
filled with the remains of other railway-cars foully scrapped for some
fell industrial purpose. But this was a bad guess. The tracks led me
at last through a lane and thence into sight of a little bay, on whose
waters were perceptible the deck heads of sundry human beings, and on
its sands the full-lengths of sundry other human beings in bath-robes,
reading novels or merely basking. There was nowhere any sign of
industrialism. More than ever was I intrigued as to the fate of the old
railway-car that I had been stalking. It and its lorry had halted on the
flat grassy land that fringed the sands. This land was dominated by a
crescent of queer little garish tenements, the like of which I had never
seen, nor would wish to see again. They did not stand on the ground, but
on stakes of wood and shafts of brick, six feet or so above the ground's
level, and were led up to by flights of wooden steps that tried not
to look like ladders. They displeased me much. They had little railed
platforms round them, and things hanging out to dry on the railings;
and their walls vied unneighbourly with one another in lawless
colour-schemes. One tenement was salmon-pink with wide bands of scarlet,
another sky-blue with a key-pattern in orange, and so on around the
whole little horrid array. And I deduced, from certain upstandin