arvates--squirophants, they might be called--and a percentage of
the visitors.

Was St. Sennan glad or sorry, we wonder, when the last two sorts
subscribed and restored him? If we had been he, one of us would have
had to have the temper of a saint to keep cool about it. Anyhow, it's
done now, and can't be undone.

But the bathing-machines are not restored, at any rate. Those
indescribables yonder, half rabbit-hutch, half dry-dock--a long row
for ladies and a short one for gentlemen, three hundred yards
apart--couldn't trust 'em any nearer, bless you!--these superannuated
God-knows-whats, struggling against disintegration from automatic
plunges down a rugged beach, and creaking journeys back you are asked
to hold on through--it's no use going on drying!--these tributes to
public decorum you can find no room in, and probably swear at--no
sacrilegious restorer has laid his hand on these. They evidently
contemplate going on for ever; for though their axes grow more and
more oblique every day, their self-confidence remains unshaken. But
then they think they _are_ St. Sennans, and that the wooden houses are
subordinate accidents, and the church a mere tributary that was a
little premature--got there first, in its hurry to show respect for
_them_. And no great wonder, seeing what a figure they cut, seen from
a boat when you have a row! Or, rather, used to cut; for now the new
town (which is beastly) has come on the cliff above, and looks for
all the world as if _it_ was St. Sennans, and speaks contemptuously
of the real town as the Beach Houses.

The new town can only be described as a tidy nightmare; yet it is
a successful creation of the brains that conceived it--a successful
creation of ground-rents. As a development of land ripe for building,
with more yards of frontage to the main-road than at first sight
geometry seems able to accommodate, it has been taking advantage of
unrivalled opportunities for a quarter of a century, backed by
advances on mortgage. It is the envy of the neighbouring proprietors
east and west along the coast, who have developed their own eligible
sites past all remedy and our endurance, and now have to drain their
purses to meet the obligations to the professional mortgagee, who is
biding his hour in peace, waiting for the fruit to fall into his mouth
and murderously sure of his prey. But at St. Sennans a mysterious
silence reigns behind a local office that yields keys on application,
and answer