scuttle sideways, take the place
of the grass and spires of loosestrife; and over the water, instead of
singing larks, hang white companies of chiding seagulls. Here at high
tide extends a sheet of water large enough, when the wind blows up the
estuary, to breed waves that break in foam and spray against the barges,
while at the ebb acres of mud flats are disclosed on which the boats
lean slanting till the flood lifts them again and makes them strain at
the wheezing ropes that tie them to the quay.

A year before the flame of war went roaring through Europe in
unquenchable conflagration it would have seemed that nothing could
possibly rouse Ashbridge from its red-brick Georgian repose. There was
never a town so inimitably drowsy or so sternly uncompetitive. A hundred
years ago it must have presented almost precisely the same appearance as
it did in the summer of 1913, if we leave out of reckoning a few
dozen of modern upstart villas that line its outskirts, and the very
inconspicuous railway station that hides itself behind the warehouses
near the river's bank. Most of the trains, too, quite ignore its
existence, and pass through it on their way to more rewarding
stopping-places, hardly recognising it even by a spurt of steam from
their whistles, and it is only if you travel by those that require
the most frequent pauses in their progress that you will be enabled to
alight at its thin and depopulated platform.

Just outside the station there perennially waits a low-roofed and
sanguine omnibus that under daily discouragement continues to hope that
in the long-delayed fulness of time somebody will want to be driven
somewhere. (This nobody ever does, since the distance to any house is so
small, and a porter follows with luggage on a barrow.) It carries on its
floor a quantity of fresh straw, in the manner of the stage coaches, in
which the problematic passenger, should he ever appear, will no doubt
bury his feet. On its side, just below the window that is not made to
open, it carries the legend that shows that it belongs to the Comber
Arms, a hostelry so self-effacing that it is discoverable only by the
sharpest-eyed of pilgrims. Narrow roadways, flanked by proportionately
narrower pavements, lie ribbon-like between huddled shops and
squarely-spacious Georgian houses; and an air of leisure and content,
amounting almost to stupefaction, is the moral atmosphere of the place.

On the outskirts of the town, crowning the gen