y ancients wished to be.

The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern town was
discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it might have been two
hundred, so great was the change to its sheltered atmosphere. Loitering
in its quiet streets among the old picturesque brick houses with tiled
or thatched roofs and tall chimneys--ivy and rose and creeper-covered,
with a background of old oaks and elms--I had the sensation of having
come back to my own home. In that still air you could hear men and women
talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry or laugh of a child and
the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature,
the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter
of swallows and martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It
was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to
go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more. Rut there
were compensations.

The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late summer
visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste so much precious
time shut up in apartments, and at every appearance of a slight
improvement in the weather they would pour out of the houses and the
green slope would be covered with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying
down to the beach. The crowd was composed mostly of women--about three
to every man, I should say--and their children; and it was one of the
most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of the large
number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type, which chance had
brought together at that spot. It was the large English blonde, and
there were so many individuals of this type that they gave a character
to the crowd so that those of a different physique and colour appeared
to be fewer than they were and were almost overlooked. They came from
various places about the country, in the north and the Midlands, and
appeared to be of the well-to-do classes; they, or many of them, were
with their families but without their lords. They were mostly tall and
large in every way, very white-skinned, with light or golden hair and
large light blue eyes. A common character of these women was their quiet
reposeful manner; they walked and talked and rose up and sat down and
did everything, in fact, with an air of deliberation; they gazed in a
slow steady way at you, and were dignified, some even majestic, and were
like a herd of large