tion and of unskilled labour.
When I was a child the charm of a castle was not in the building of
it, but in jumping over it when it was built. Nor was this an enduring
charm. After a few jumps one abandoned one's castle and asked one's
nurse for a bun, or picked a quarrel with some child even smaller than
oneself, or went paddling. As it was, so it is. My survey of the sands
this morning showed me that forty years had made no difference. Here was
plenty of animation, plenty of scurrying and gambolling, of laughter and
tears. But the actual spadework was a mere empty form. For all but the
builder of that cottage. For him, manifestly, a passion, a rite.

He stood, spade in hand, contemplating, from one angle and another, what
he had done. He was perhaps nine years old; if so, small for his age.
He had very thin legs in very short grey knickerbockers, a pale freckled
face, and hair that matched the sand. He was not remarkable. But with
a little good-will one can always find something impressive in anybody.
When Mr. Mallaby-Deeley won a wide and very sudden fame in connexion
with Covent Garden, an awe-stricken reporter wrote of him for The Daily
Mail, 'he has the eyes of a dreamer.' I believe that Mr. Cecil Rhodes
really had. So, it seemed to me, had this little boy. They were pale
grey eyes, rather prominent, with an unwavering light in them. I guessed
that they were regarding the cottage rather as what it should be than as
what it had become. To me it appeared quite perfect. But I surmised
that to him, artist that he was, it seemed a poor thing beside his first
flushed conception.

He knelt down and, partly with the flat of his spade, partly with the
palm of one hand, redressed some (to me obscure) fault in one of the
gables. He rose, stood back, his eyes slowly endorsed the amendment.
A few moments later, very suddenly, he scudded away to the adjacent
breakwater and gave himself to the task of scraping off it some of the
short green sea-weed wherewith he had made the cottage's two gardens so
pleasantly realistic, oases so refreshing in the sandy desert. Were the
lawns somehow imperfect? Anon, when he darted back, I saw what it was
that his taste had required: lichen, moss, for the roof. Sundry morsels
and patches of green he deftly disposed in the angles of roof and
gables. His stock exhausted, off to the breakwater he darted, and back
again, to and fro with the lightning directness of a hermit-bee making
its nest of p