ere was that
much of concord and festive union among the inhabitants.

The house on the beach had been posted where it stood, one supposes, for
the sake of the sea-view, from which it turned right about to face the
town across a patch of grass and salt scurf, looking like a square and
scornful corporal engaged in the perpetual review of an awkward squad of
recruits. Sea delighted it not, nor land either. Marine Parade fronting
it to the left, shaded sickly eyes, under a worn green verandah, from
a sun that rarely appeared, as the traducers of spinsters pretend those
virgins are ever keenly on their guard against him that cometh not.
Belle Vue Terrace stared out of lank glass panes without reserve,
unashamed of its yellow complexion. A gaping public-house, calling
itself newly Hotel, fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of
royalty and bloody battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in
bowwindows beside other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the
attention a decent straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference.
On an elevated meadow to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba
nestled among weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff.
Shavenness, featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed
the outward expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to
come from London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich
to distract the naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating
brine to the determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an
appetite that rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite
of certain frank whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the
common to mingle with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and
gentleman entering the town to take lodgings for a month, and that
on the morrow they took a boat from the shore, saying in their faint
English to a sailor veteran of the coastguard, whom they had consulted
about the weather, "It is better zis zan zat," as they shrugged between
rough sea and corpselike land. And they were not seen again. Their
meaning none knew. Having paid their bill at the lodging-house, their
conduct was ascribed to systematic madness. English people came to
Crikswich for the pure salt sea air, and they did not expect it to be
cooked and dressed and decorated for them. If these things are done to
nature, it is nature no longer that you have, but something Frenchified.
Those Frenc