y coasters and colliers make use of its wharves. The town is
charmingly situated, but it is unlovely, and, for the tourist, is
only a stepping-stone to somewhere else. The Automobile Club of Great
Britain and Ireland directs one to the suburb of Clifton, or rather
to Clifton Down, for hotel accommodation, but you can do much better
than that by stopping at the Half Moon Hotel in the main street, a
frankly commercial house, but with ample garage accommodation and
good plain fare, of which roast little pig, boiled mutton,
cauliflower, and mashed potatoes, with the ever recurring apple tart,
form the principal items.

Chapter II
The South Coast

[Illustration: The South Coast]

The south coast of England is ever dear to the Londoner who spends
his week's end out of town. Here he finds the nearest whiff of
salt-water breeze that he can call his own. He may go down the Thames
on a Palace steamer to Southend, and he will have to content himself
most of the way with a succession of mud-flats and eat winkles with a
brassy pin when he gets there; he may even go on to Margate and find
a fresh east wind which will blow the London fog out of his brain;
but, until he rounds the Foreland, he will find nothing that will
remind him in the least of his beloved Eastbourne, Brighton, and
Worthing.

The most popular south coast automobile run from London is to
Brighton, fifty-two miles, via Croyden, Redhill, and Crawley. Many
"weekenders" make this trip nearly every Saturday to Monday in the
year, and get to know every rut and stone in the roadway and every
degenerate policeman of the rapacious crew who hide in hedges and lie
in wait for poor unfortunate automobilists who may have slipped down
a sloping bit of clear roadway at a speed of twenty and one-tenth
miles per hour (instead of nineteen and nine-tenths), all figured out
by rule of thumb and with the aid of a thirty-shilling stop-watch.

"_Ils sont terribles, ces betes des gendarmes on trouve en
Angleterre,_" said a terror-stricken French friend of ours who had
been held up beyond Crawley for a "technical offence." Nothing was
said against a drunken drayman who backed his wagon up against our
friend's mudguard ten miles back, and smashed it beyond repair.
Justice, thy name is not in the vocabulary of the English policeman
sent out by his sergeant to keep watch on automobilists!

Our road to the sea was by Rochester, Canterbury, and Dover, in the
first instance, following m