was heard; no step moved; no candle was lighted.

He saw that there, as well, they did not care to awake.

The house of stone and the thatched hovel were equally deaf to the
wretched.

The boy decided on pushing on further, and penetrating the strait of
houses which stretched away in front of him, so dark that it seemed more
like a gulf between two cliffs than the entrance to a town.

CHAPTER IV.

ANOTHER FORM OF DESERT.

It was Weymouth which he had just entered. Weymouth then was not the
respectable and fine Weymouth of to-day.

Ancient Weymouth did not present, like the present one, an
irreproachable rectangular quay, with an inn and a statue in honour of
George III. This resulted from the fact that George III. had not yet
been born. For the same reason they had not yet designed on the slope of
the green hill towards the east, fashioned flat on the soil by cutting
away the turf and leaving the bare chalk to the view, the white horse,
an acre long, bearing the king upon his back, and always turning, in
honour of George III., his tail to the city. These honours, however,
were deserved. George III., having lost in his old age the intellect he
had never possessed in his youth, was not responsible for the calamities
of his reign. He was an innocent. Why not erect statues to him?

Weymouth, a hundred and eighty years ago, was about as symmetrical as a
game of spillikins in confusion. In legends it is said that Astaroth
travelled over the world, carrying on her back a wallet which contained
everything, even good women in their houses. A pell-mell of sheds thrown
from her devil's bag would give an idea of that irregular Weymouth--the
good women in the sheds included. The Music Hall remains as a specimen
of those buildings. A confusion of wooden dens, carved and eaten by
worms (which carve in another fashion)--shapeless, overhanging
buildings, some with pillars, leaning one against the other for support
against the sea wind, and leaving between them awkward spaces of narrow
and winding channels, lanes, and passages, often flooded by the
equinoctial tides; a heap of old grandmother houses, crowded round a
grandfather church--such was Weymouth; a sort of old Norman village
thrown up on the coast of England.

The traveller who entered the tavern, now replaced by the hotel, instead
of paying royally his twenty-five francs for a fried sole and a bottle
of wine, had to suffer the humiliation of eating a pennywort