st cheerfully he assured me that I should find
nothing to eat in Murglebed.

"You can amuse yourself," said I, "by sending me down a daily hamper of
provisions."

"There isn't even a church," he continued.

"Then you can send me down a tin one from Humphreys'. I believe they can
supply one with everything from a tin rabbit-hutch to a town hall."

He sighed and departed, and the next day I found myself here, in
Murglebed-on-Sea.

On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors
of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of
waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile away
from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition
call the sea. The interim is mud--oozy, brown, malevolent mud. Sometimes
it seems to heave as if with the myriad bodies of slimy crawling eels
and worms and snakes. A few foul boats lie buried in it.

Here and there, on land, a surly inhabitant spits into it. If you
address him he snorts at you unintelligibly. If you turn your back to
the sea you are met by a prospect of unimagined despair. There are
no trees. The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles
inland--an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a
general shop, a couple of low public-houses, and three perky red-brick
villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you
will, of Murglebed-on-Sea. Renniker is a wonderful man.

I have rented a couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas. It has
a decayed bit of front garden in which a gnarled, stunted stick is
planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of
the villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in
Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the
morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers
over the waste, building as he goes. In the evenings he gets drunk at
the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man,
with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams.

His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set,
black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of
her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under
foot. She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other
sustenance sent by Rogers from Benoist, of which she consumes prodigious
quantities. She wonders, as far as