g stakes
and shafts at the nearer end of the crescent, that the horror was not
complete yet. A suspicion dawned in me, and became, while I gazed again
at the crescent's facades, a glaring certainty; in the light of which I
saw that I had been wrong about the old railway-car. Defunct, it was not
to die. It was to have a new function.

I had once heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into
sea-side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor
protruded in my memory. To-day, as an eye-witness of the accomplished
fact, I was impressed, sharply enough, and I went nearer to the
crescent, drawn by a sort of dreadful fascination. I found that the
cottages all had names. One cottage was Mermaid's Rock; another (which
had fluttering window-curtains of Stuart tartan), Spray o' the Sea;
another, The Nest; another, Brinynook; and yet another had been named,
with less fitness, but in an ampler and to me more interesting spirit,
Petworth. I looked from them to the not-yet-converted railway-car. It
had a wonderful dignity. In its austere and monumental way, it was
very beautiful. It was a noble work of man, and Nature smiled on it. I
wondered with what colours it was to be bejezebelled, and what
name--Bolton Abbey?--Glad Eye?--Gay Wee Gehenna?--it would have to bear,
and what manner of man or woman was going to rent it.

It was on this last point that I mused especially. The housing problem
is hard, doubtless; but nobody, my mind protested as I surveyed the
crescent, nobody is driven to so desperate a solution of it as this!
There are tents, there are caves, there are hollow trees...and there
are people who prefer--this! Yes, 'this' is a positive taste, not a
necessity at all. I swept the bay with a searching eye; but heads on
the surface of water tell nothing to the sociologist, and in bath-robes
even full-lengths on the sand give him no clue. Three or four of the
full-lengths had risen and strolled up to the lorry, around which the
mechanics were engaged in some dispute of a technical nature. I hoped
the full-lengths would have something to say too. But they said nothing.
This I set down to sheer perversity. I was more than three miles from
the place where I am sojourning, and the hour for luncheon was nearly
due. I left the bay without having been able to determine the character,
the kind, of its denizens.

I take it there is a strong tincture of Bohemianism in them. Mr. Desmond
MacCarthy, of whose judgment I