and green sea-fringes that cling closer still, and
brown sea-ramifications that are studded with pods that pop if you
tread on them, but are not quite so slippery; only you may just as
well be careful, even with them. And we should recommend you, before
you jump, to be sure you are not hooked over a bolt, not merely
because you may get caught, and fall over a secluded reading-public
on the other side, but because the red rust comes off on you and soils
your white petticoat.

If you don't mind jumping off these breakwaters--and it really is
rather a lark--you may tramp along the sea front quite near up to
where the fishing-luggers lie, each with a capstan all to itself,
under the little extra old town the red-tanned fishing-nets live in,
in houses that are like sailless windmill-tops whose plank walls have
almost merged their outlines in innumerable coats of tar, laid by
long generations back of the forefathers of the men in oil-cloth
head-and-shoulder hats who repair their nets for ever in the Channel
wind, unless you want a boat to-day, in which case they will scull you
about, while you absolutely ache sympathetically with their efforts,
of which they themselves remain serenely unaware, till you've been out
long enough. Then they beach you cleverly on the top of a wave, and
their family circle seizes you, boat and all, and runs you up the
shingle before the following wave can catch you and splash you, which
it wants to do.

There is an aroma of the Norman Conquest and of Domesday Book about
the old town. Research will soon find out, if she looks sharp, that
there is nothing Norman in the place except the old arch in the
amorphous church-tower, and a castle at a distance on the flats. But
the flavour of the past is stronger in the scattered memories of
bygone sea-battles not a century ago, and the names of streets that
do not antedate the Georges, than in these mere scraps that are always
open to the reproach of mediaevalism, and are separated from us by a
great gulf. And it doesn't much matter to us whether the memories are
of victory or defeat, or the names those of sweeps or heroes. All's
one to us--we glow; perhaps rashly, for, you see, we really know very
little about them. And he who has read no history to speak of, if he
glows about the past on the strength of his imperfect data, may easily
break his molasses-jug.

So, whether our blood is stirred by Nelson and Trafalgar, whereof
we have read, or by the Duke