The
Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland makes no recommendation
as to the hotels of Arundel, and presumably the Norfolk Arms cares
nothing for the automobile traffic. We did not stop at any hotel, but
left our machine outside the castle gate, enjoyed the conventional
stroll about inside the walls and in an hour were on the way to
Chichester.

Sussex is a county which, according to some traditions possesses four
particular delicacies. Izaak Walton, in 1653, named them as follows:
a Selsea cockle, a Chichester lobster, an Arundel mullet, and an
Amberley trout. Another authority, Ray, adds to these three more: a
Pulborough eel, a Rye herring, and a Bourn wheatear, which, he says,
"are the best in their kind, understand it, of those that are taken
in this country."

Chichester is a cathedral town not usually included in the itinerary
of stranger-tourists. Its proud old cathedral and its detached
bell-tower are remarkable for many things, but the strangeness of the
belfry, entirely unconnected with the church fabric itself, will
strike the natives of the land of skyscrapers most of all.

Chichester is conservative in all things, and social affairs, said a
public-house habitue, are entirely dominated by the cathedral clique.
He may have been a bad authority, this doddering old septuagenarian,
mouthing his pint of beer, but he entertained us during the half-hour
of a passing shower with many plain-spoken opinions about many
things, including subjects as wide apart as clericalism and
submarines.

Our route from Chichester was to Portsmouth and Southsea, neither of
which interested us to any extent. The former is warlike in every
turn of its crooked streets and the latter is full of retired
colonels and majors, who keep always to the middle of the footpath
across Southsea Common, and will not turn the least bit to one side,
for courtesy or any other reason. Too much curry on their rice or
port after dinner probably accounts for it.

We stopped at the George at Portsmouth. It offers no accommodation
for automobiles, but a garage is near by. The halo of sentiment and
romance hung over the more or less dingy old hotel, dingy but clean,
and possessed of a parlour filled with a collection of old furniture
which would make the connoisseur want to carry it all away with him.

This was the terminus of old-time travel from London to Portsmouth.
The Portsmouth road, in coaching days as in automobile days, ran
through En