s jewels just
missed being a Woodbridgian!

Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at Liverpool
Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue locomotives of the
Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and Ipswich and finally
set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at Woodbridge. As you step from
the stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will tingle in your
nostrils; and you may discover in it a faint under-whiff of strong
tobacco--the undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall by old
Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder himself. If you have your
bicycle with you, or are content to hire one, you will find that rolling
Suffolk country the most delightful in the world for quiet spinning.
(But carry a repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is
full of memories--of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the
"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of Suffolk
blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the four brothers
who founded the great publishing house of Harper and Brothers a century
ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike to Bury St.
Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our beloved William McFee also!)
and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey
ringing under the waves. If you are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out
Cockfield Rectory, near Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in
1872. (Colvin himself came from Bealings, only two miles from
Woodbridge.) You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr.
Britling; and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's
painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln Quay
or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop down to
Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the shingle. You
will pace the river walk to Kyson--perhaps the tide will be out and
sunset tints shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. Brown seaweed,
vivid green samphire, purple flats of slime where the river ran a few
hours before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour of the channel
and a group of stately swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs
of the town with the stately church tower and the waving arms of the
windmill looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist.
You may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion
for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is s