d, Pacton Park is one great
attraction--the pretty market-town of Eyemouth another--the everlasting,
never-tiring sea a third; and, at high-summer, when the Devonshire lanes
are not knee-deep in mire, the nevertheless immeasurably filthy, though
picturesque, mud-built village of Oxton.

Then again (and really as I enumerate these multitudinous advantages, I
begin to relent for having called it dull), you may pick up curious
agate pebbles on the beach, as well as corallines and scarce sea-weeds,
good for gumming on front-parlour windows; you may fish _for_ whitings
in the bay, and occasionally catch them; you may wade in huge caoutchouc
boots among the muddy shallows of the Mullet, and shoot _at_ cormorants
and curlews; you may walk to satiety between high-banked and rather
dirty cross-roads; and, if you will scramble up the hedge-row, may get
now and then peeps of undulated country landscape.

Moreover, you have free liberty to drop in any where to
"tiffin"--Burleigh being very Indianized, and a guest always welcome;
indeed, so Indianized is it, so populous in jaundiced cheek and ailing
livers, that you may openly assert, without fear of being misunderstood
(if you wish to vary your common phrase of loyalty), that Victoria sits
upon the "musnud" of Great Britain; you may order curry in the smallest
pot-house, and still be sure to get the rice well-cooked; you may call
your house-maid "ayah," without risk of warning for impertinence; you
may vent your wrath against indolent waiters in eloquence of "jaa,
soostee;" and, finally, you may go to the library, and besides the
advantage of the day-before-yesterday's Times, you may behold in bilious
presence an affable, but authoritative, old gentleman, who introduces
himself, "Sir, you see in me the hero of Puttymuddyfudgepoor."

You may even now see such an one, I say, and hear him too, if you will
but go to Burleigh; seeing he has by this time over-lived the year or so
whereof our tale discourses. He has, by dint of service, attained to the
dignity of General H.E.I.C.S., and--which he was still longer coming
to--the wisdom of being a communicative creature; though possibly, by a
natural reaction, at present he carries anti-secresy a little too far,
and verges on the gossiping extreme. But, at the time to which we must
look back to commence this right-instructive story, General Tracy was
still drinking "Hodgson's Pale" in India, was so taciturn as to be
considered almost dumb