ubiquitous. As an illustration, there is
said to be a maritime town in a remote part of England, which, besides
being full of quaintness (of a kind not invariably pleasant) and of foul
smells, is also full of more than half-savage fishermen and idiots;
idiots that often come out at dusk, and greatly alarm strangers by
running after them.

Some years ago, one of these idiots went into a stranger's house, took a
noisy baby out of its cot, and after tubbing it well (which I think
showed that the idiot possessed certain powers of observation), cut off
its head, throwing the offending member into the fire. The parents were
naturally indignant, and so were some of the inhabitants; but the affair
was speedily forgotten, and although the murderer was confined to a
lunatic asylum, nothing was done to rid the town of other idiots who
were, collectively, doing mischief of a nature far more serious than
that of the recently perpetrated murder.

The wild and rugged coast upon which the town is situated was formerly
the hunting-ground of wreckers, and I fear the present breed of
fishermen, in spite of their hypocritical pretensions to religion, prove
only too plainly by their abominable cruelty to birds and inhospitable
treatment of strangers, that they are in reality no better than their
forbears. This inherited strain of cruelty in the fishermen would alone
account for the presence of vampires and every other kind of vicious
elemental; but the town has still another attraction--namely, a
prehistoric burial-ground, on a wide expanse of thinly populated
moorland--in its rear.

_A propos_ of vampires, my friend Mrs South writes to me as follows (I
quote her letter _ad verbum_): "The other night, I was dining with a
very old friend of mine whom I had not seen for years, and, during a
pause in the conversation, he suddenly said, 'Do you believe in
vampires?' I wondered for a moment if he had gone mad, and I think, in
my matter-of-fact way, I blurted out something of the sort; but I saw in
a moment, from the expression in his eyes, that he had something to
tell me, and that he was not at all in the mood to be laughed at or
misunderstood, 'Tell me,' I said, 'I am listening.' 'Well,' he replied,
'I had an extraordinary experience a few months ago, and not a word of
it have I breathed to any living soul. But sometimes the horror of it so
overpowers me that I feel I must share my secret with someone; and
you--well, you and I have always b