the
village, the world is your own. A conspiracy to populate a part of the
Downs near the sea, a mile or so to the east of Rottingdean, seems
gloriously to have failed, but what was intended may be learned from the
skeleton roads that, duly fenced in, disfigure the turf. They even have
names, these unlovely parallelograms: one is Chatsworth Avenue, and
Ambleside Avenue another.

CHAPTER XIX

SHOREHAM

Hove the impeccable--The Aldrington of the past--A digression on
seaports--Old Shoreham and history--Mr. Swinburne's poem--A baby
saint--Successful bribery--The Adur--Old Shoreham church and
bridge.

The cliffs that make the coast between Newhaven and Brighton so
attractive slope gradually to level ground at the Aquarium and never
reappear in Sussex on the Channel's edge again, although in the east
they rise whiter and higher, with a few long gaps, all the way to Dover.
It is partly for this reason that the walk from Brighton to Shoreham has
no beauty save of the sea. Hove, which used to be a disreputable little
smuggling village sufficiently far from Brighton for risks to be run
with safety, is now the well-ordered home of wealthy rectitude. Mrs.
Grundy's sea-side home is here. Hove is, perhaps, the genteelest town in
the world, although once, only a poor hundred years ago, there was no
service in the church on a certain Sunday, because, as the clerk
informed the complaisant vicar, "The pews is full of tubs and the pulpit
full of tea"--a pleasant fact to reflect upon during Church Parade amid
the gay yet discreet prosperity of the Brunswick Lawns.

[Illustration: _New Shoreham Church._]

West of Hove, and between that town and Portslade-by-Sea, is Aldrington.
Aldrington is now new houses and brickfields. Thirty years ago it was
naught. But five hundred years ago it was the principal township in
these parts, and Brighthelmstone a mere insignificant cluster of hovels.
Centuries earlier it was more important still, for, according to some
authorities, it was the Portus Adurni of the Romans. The river Adur,
which now enters the sea between Shoreham and Southwick, once flowed
along the line of the present canal and the Wish Pond, and so out into
the sea. I have seen it stated that the mouth of the river was even more
easterly still--somewhere opposite the Norfolk Hotel at Brighton; but
this may be fanciful and can now hardly be proven. The suggestion,
however, adds interest to a walk on the