t the cluster, one might almost say the tangle,
of small shipping which grew thicker as our little pleasure boat crawled
up into Yarmouth Harbour. A boat entering this harbour, as every one
knows, does not enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps
round at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear. The
passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic, and in
consequence the bigger ships look colossal. As we passed under a timber
ship from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens like a cathedral,
the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden figurehead carved like a
woman, and said, like one continuing a conversation, "Now, why have they
left off having them. They didn't do any one any harm?"

I replied with some flippancy about the captain's wife being jealous;
but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note. There has
been something in our most recent civilisation which is mysteriously
hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.

"They hate anything like that, which is human and pretty," he continued,
exactly echoing my thoughts. "I believe they broke up all the jolly old
figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it."

"Like Mr. Quilp," I answered, "when he battered the wooden Admiral with
the poker."

His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the first time he stood
erect and stared at me.

"Do you come to Yarmouth for that?" he asked.

"For what?"

"For Dickens," he answered, and drummed with his foot on the deck.

"No," I answered; "I come for fun, though that is much the same thing."

"I always come," he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat. It isn't
here."

And when he said that I understood him perfectly.

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred to the people
who live there. I myself have never come to the end of the list of
Batterseas. But there are two to the stranger and tourist; the poor
part, which is dignified, and the prosperous part, which is savagely
vulgar. My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost; to the
latter he would only distantly allude.

"The place is very much spoilt now... trippers, you know," he would say,
not at all scornfully, but simply sadly. That was the nearest he would
go to an admission of the monstrous watering place that lay along
the front, outblazing the sun, and more deafening than the sea. But
behind--out of earshot of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow that
they seem li