inal form at Whitby,
owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the
locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; but at Whitby, St.
Hilda drove them over the cliff, and the serpents, before being
petrified, had all their heads broken off by the fall!

XI.--DEAL.

[Illustration: DEAL.]

I have had occasion,[W] elsewhere, to consider at some length, the
peculiar love of the English for neatness and minuteness: but I have
only considered, without accounting for, or coming to any conclusion
about it; and, the more I think of it, the more it puzzles me to
understand what there can be in our great national mind which delights
to such an extent in brass plates, red bricks, square curbstones, and
fresh green paint, all on the tiniest possible scale. The other day I
was dining in a respectable English "Inn and Posting-house," not ten
miles from London, and, measuring the room after dinner, I found it
exactly twice and a quarter the height of my umbrella. It was a highly
comfortable room, and associated, in the proper English manner, with
outdoor sports and pastimes, by a portrait of Jack Hall, fisherman of
Eton, and of Mr. C. Davis on his favorite mare; but why all this hunting
and fishing enthusiasm should like to reduce itself, at home, into twice
and a quarter the height of an umbrella, I could not in any wise then,
nor have I at any other time been able to ascertain.

[W] _Modern Painters_, vol. iv. chap. 1.

Perhaps the town of Deal involves as much of this question in its aspect
and reputation, as any other place in Her Majesty's dominions: or at
least it seemed so to me, coming to it as I did, after having been
accustomed to the boat-life at Venice, where the heavy craft, massy in
build and massy in sail, and disorderly in aquatic economy, reach with
their mast-vanes only to the first stories of the huge marble palaces
they anchor among. It was very strange to me, after this, knowing that
whatever was brave and strong in the English sailor was concentrated in
our Deal boatmen, to walk along that trim strip of conventional
beach, which the sea itself seems to wash in a methodical manner, one
shingle-step at a time; and by its thin toy-like boats, each with its
head to sea, at regular intervals, looking like things that one would
give a clever boy to play with in a pond, when first he got past
petticoats; and the row of lath cots behind, all tidiness and telegraph,
looking as if