rmouth and Lowestoft owe a great deal to the
Great Eastern Railway, which has made them places of health-resort from
all parts of England; and truly the pleasure-seeker or the holiday-maker
may go farther and fare worse.

I was a proud boy when first I set foot in Yarmouth. How I came to go
there I can scarcely remember, but it is to be presumed I accompanied my
father on one of those grand occasions--as far as Nonconformist circles
are concerned--when the brethren met together for godly comfort and
counsel. It is true Wrentham was in Suffolk, and Yarmouth was in
Norfolk, but the Congregational Churches of that quarter had always been
connected by Christian fellowship and sympathy, and hence I was taken to
Yarmouth--at that time far more like a Dutch than an English town--and
wonderful to me was the Quay, with its fine houses on one side and its
long line of ships on the other--something like the far-famed Bompjes of
Rotterdam--and the narrow rows in which the majority of the labouring
classes were accustomed to live. 'A row,' wrote Charles Dickens, 'is a
long, narrow lane or alley, quite straight, or as nearly so as may be,
with houses on each side, both of which you can sometimes touch with the
finger-tips of each hand by stretching out your arms to their full
extent. Many and many a picturesque old bit of domestic architecture is
to be hunted up among the rows. In some there is little more than a
blank wall for the double boundary. In others the houses retreat into
busy square courts, where washing and clear-starching are done, and
wonderful nasturtiums and scarlet-runners are reared from green boxes
filled with that scarce commodity, vegetable mould. Most of these rows
are paved with pebbles from the beach, and to traverse them a peculiar
form of low cart, drawn by a single horse, is employed.' This to me was
a great novelty, as with waggons and carts I was familiar, but not with a
Yarmouth cart--now, I find, replaced by wheelbarrows. In Amsterdam, at
the present day, you may see many such quaint old rows. But in Amsterdam
you have an evil-smelling air, while in Yarmouth it is ever fresh and
crisp, and redolent, as it were, of the neighbouring sea. The
market-place and the big church were at the back of this congeries of
quays and rows, and the sea and the old pier were at quite a respectable
distance from the town. I fancy the Yarmouth of the London bathers has
now extended down to the sandy beach, and t