e hive; a comely
stretch of ample docks and decent wharves along the frontage of the
town, and, straggling out along the horns of the harbour, a maze of
poorer streets, fringed at the waterside with boozing-kens, low inns,
sailors' lodging-houses, and crimperies of all kinds. There were
ticklish places for decent folk to be found in lying to right and left
of the solemn old town--aye, and within ten minutes' walk of the solemn
old market-square, where the effigy of Sir William Wallet, the goodly
and godly Mayor of many years back, smiled upon the stalls of the
hucksters and the fine front of the town-hall. If you strayed but a
little way from the core of the town you came into narrow, kinkled
streets, where nets were stretched across from window to window drying;
and if you persevered you came, by cobbly declivities, to the bay shore,
and to all the odd places that lay along it, and all the odd people that
dwelt therein.

Of course, with the inevitable perversity of boyhood, it was this
degenerate quarter of the town which delighted me. I cared nothing, I am
sorry to say, for the fine-fronted town-hall, nor for the solemn effigy
of Sir William Wallet. I had not the least desire ever to be a
functionary of importance in the building, ever to earn the smug
immortality of such a statue. I am sorry to say the places I cared for
were those same low-lived, straggling, squalid, dangerous regions which
hung at one end of respectable little Sendennis like dirty lace upon a
demure petticoat. In the early days of my acquaintance with those
regions I must confess that I entered them with a certain degree of
fear and trembling; but after a while that feeling soon wore off, when I
found that no one wanted to do me any harm. Indeed, the dwellers in
those parts were generally too much occupied in drinking themselves
drunk and sleeping themselves sober to note an unremarkable lad like me.
As for their holiday time, they passed it so largely in quarrelling
savagely, and occasionally murderously, amongst themselves that they had
scant leisure to pay any heed to me. For the rest, these Sendennis slums
were not conspicuously evil. You will find just the same places in any
seaport town, great or little, in the kingdom. But there was one spot in
Sendennis which I do not think that it would be easy to match in any
other town, although, perhaps to say this may be but a flash of
provincial pride on my part.

A good way from the town, and yet b