I do not know that at any time Hastings is a very lively place.  The houses have acquired a habit of being vacant, and even the front, with its bath-chairs, its bandstands that are silent on Sundays, and its seats upon which one may not smoke, is more suggestive of Puritans and invalids than of pleasure.  If Time should suddenly drop a week from the due order of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists with vacant faces of dead men.  But when in late March the day has squandered its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted the shore, creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter with salt, a p. 85man might surely be forgiven if he cried aloud against the extreme cruelty of Nature, the timid injustice of man.

Being of Anglo-Saxon blood, I did not give definite expression to the melancholy which the quenched seascape had invoked.  I contented myself with leaning on the rail, and sneering at the art of the cripple who had made mathematically exact scratchings of Windsor Castle and the Eddystone Lighthouse on the sand.  There was something almost humorously impertinent about that twisted figure with one foot bowing and hopping for pennies in front of a terrible back-cloth of dreamy grey.  How could a man forget the horrors of infinite space, and scratch nothings on the blank face of the earth for coppers?  His one foot was bare so that his Silver-like activities might not spoil his pictures, and when he was not hopping he shivered miserably.  As I saw him at the moment he stood very well for humanity—sordid, grotesque, greedy of mean things, twisted and bruised by the pitiless hand of Nature.

And then in a flash there happened one of p. 86those miracles which rebuke us when we lack faith.  Through the shadows which were not grey but purple there burst a swarm of children running on light feet across the sands.  They chased each other hither and thither, stooped to gather shells and seaweed, and inspected the works of the cripple with outspoken admiration.  Regarding my mournful and terrible world in detail, they found it beautiful with pink shells and tangled seaweed and the gallant efforts of men.  So far from being terrified or humiliated by the sombre wastes of sand and sky, they made of the one a playing-ground, and woke the other with echoes of their shrill laughter.  Perhaps they found that the sea was rather larger than the Serpentine, perhaps they thought that the sands were not so well lit as Kingsway; but, after all, they were making holiday, and at such a time things are different.  They laughed at space.

For these were London children, and all the resources of civilisation had not been able to deprive them of that sense of proportion which we lose with age.  The stars are p. 87small and of little importance, and even the sun is not much larger than a brandy-ball.  But a golden pebble by the seashore is a treasure that a child may hold in its hand, and it is certain that never a grown-up one of us can own anything so surely.  We may search our memories for sunsets and tresses of dead girls, but who would not give all their faded fragrance for one pink shell and the power to appreciate it?  So it was that I had found the world wide and ugly and terrible, lacking the Aladdin’s lamp of imagination, which had shown the children that it was a place of treasure, with darkness to make the search exciting.  They flitted about the beach like eager moths.

Yet on these children Civilisation had worked with her utmost cunning, with her most recent resource.  For they were little actors and actresses from Drury Lane, touring in a pantomime of their own; wise enough in the world’s ways to play grown-up characters with uncommon skill, and bred in the unreality of the footlights and the falsehood of grease-paints.  Nevertheless, coming fresh from the elaborate make-belief p. 88of the theatre and ............