rms would receive a guinea in which
to drink Mr. Gould's good health. This fact being made public by the
defeated candidate, Mr. Gould was unseated. At the following election,
such was the enduring power of the original guinea, he was elected
again.

After the life of the harbour, the chief interest of Shoreham is its
river, the Adur, a yellow, sluggish, shallow stream, of great width near
the town, which at low tide dwindles into a streamlet trickling through
a desert of mud, but at the full has the beauty of a lake. Mr.
Swinburne, in the same poem from which I have been quoting, thus
describes the river at evening:--

Skies fulfilled with the sundown, stilled and splendid, spread as a
flower that spreads,
Pave with rarer device and fairer than heaven's the luminous
oyster-beds,
Grass-embanked, and in square plots ranked, inlaid with gems that
the sundown sheds.

[Sidenote: MR. HENLEY'S POEM]

To the Adur belongs also another lyric. It is printed in _Hawthorn and
Lavender_, to which I have already referred, and is one of Mr. Henley's
most characteristic and remarkable poems:--

In Shoreham River, hurrying down
To the live sea,
By working, marrying, breeding, Shoreham Town,
Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream,
An old, black rotter of a boat
Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote,
Lay stranded in mid-stream;
With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,
That made me think of legs and a broken spine;
Soon, all too soon,
Ungainly and forlorn to lie
Full in the eye
Of the cynical, discomfortable moon
That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky,
A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by
The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned;
The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing;
The poor old hulk remained,
Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why--
Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying.
For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying--
Dying or dead;
And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:--
"_Dear God, it's I!_"

The Adur is no longer the home of birds that once it was, but in the
early morning one may still see there many of the less common water
fowl. The road to Portsmouth is carried across the Adur by the Norfolk
Suspension Bridge, to cross which one must pay a toll,--not an
unpleasant rem