nt gardens; cabbages and runner beans
climb the hillside in orderly rows at their backs. The women curtsey
to a stranger; the men touch their hats; and the inhabitants are
mostly advanced in years, for the young men and maidens leave the
village to go into 'good service' with testimonials Sir Felix takes a
delight to grant, because he has seen that they are well earned.
If you were to stand at the cross-roads in the middle of Eaton Square
and say 'Kirris-vean!' in a loud voice, it is odds (though I will not
promise) that a score of faces would arise from underground and gaze
out wistfully through area-railings. For no one born in Kirris-vean
can ever forget it. But Kirris-vean itself is inhabited by
grandparents and grandchildren (these last are known in Eaton Square
as 'Encumbrances'). It has a lifeboat in which Sir Felix takes a
peculiar pride (but you must not launch it unless in fine weather, or
the crew will fall out). It has also a model public-house, The Three
Wheatsheaves, so named from the Felix-Williams' coat of arms.
The people of Troy believe--or at any rate assert--that every one in
Kirris-vean is born with a complete suit of gilt buttons bearing that
device.

Few dissipations ripple the gentle flow--which it were more
descriptive perhaps to call stagnation--of life in that model
village. From week-end to week-end scarcely a boat puts forth from
the shelter of its weed-coated pier; for though Kirris-vean wears the
aspect of a place of fishery, it is in fact nothing of the kind.
Its inhabitants--blue-jerseyed males and sun-bonneted females--sit
comfortably on their pensions and tempt no perils of the deep.
Why should they risk shortening such lives as theirs? A few
crab-pots--'accessories,' as a painter would say--rest on the beach
above high-water mark, the summer through; a few tanned nets hang,
and have hung for years, a-drying against the wall of the
school-house. But the prevalent odour is of honeysuckle. The aged
coxswain of the lifeboat reported to me last year that an American
visitor had asked him how, dwelling remote from the railway, the
population dealt with its fish. 'My dear man,' said I, 'you should
have told him that you get it by Parcels' Post from Billingsgate.'

I never know--never, in this life shall I discover--how rumour
operates in Troy, how it arrives or is spread. Early in August a
rumour, incredible on the face of it, reached me that Kirris-vean
intended a Regatta! . .