such. Nice goings on!
Mixed bathing--something scandalous. Yes."

"But where is it?" I said, suddenly exasperated.

"There!" he said. "What's that flicker? A gunflash--or I'm a lost
soul!"

"You'd hear," I said, "long before it was near enough to see a
flash."

He didn't answer. Only by making it clear I would distract him until
he told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his
absorbed contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and
the shine. Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him. Then he turned
upon me cursing.

"Seven miles," he said, "along this road. And now go to 'ell with
yer!"

I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted,
and I set off towards the bungalow village.

I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the
end of the parade, and verified the wooden-legged man's directions.

"It's a lonely road, you know," he called after me. . . .

I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track.
I left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out
into the dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a
traveler who nears his end.

The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly
succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing
fatigue. The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a
mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad
undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint
sigh and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that
never completely died out again. The way was sometimes sandy, thick
with silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with
lumps that had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes
in thickets, sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent
hummocks of sand. At one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep
looming up among the gray. After a time black pinewoods intervened,
and made sustained darknesses along the road, woods that frayed
out at the edges to weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolated
pine witches would appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as
I passed. Grotesquely incongruous amidst these forms, I presently
came on estate boards, appealing, "Houses can be built to suit
purchaser," to the silence, to the shadows, and the glare.

Once I remember the persistent barking of a dog from somewhere inland
of me, and several times I took out and e