a stick and an umbrella cannot _expect_ to inspire confidence, I
suppose. I remark to the Waiter that the luggage is sure to follow me
by the next boat, but it strikes even myself that I do not bring this
out with quite a sincere ring. Not at all the manner of a man who
possesses a real portmanteau. I order dinner--the kind of dinner,
I feel, that a man who did not intend to pay for it _would_ order.
I detect this impression in the Waiter's eye. If he dared, I know
he would suggest tea and a boiled egg as more seemly under the
circumstances.

_On the Digue._--Thought, it being holiday time, that there would
be more gaiety; but Ostend just now perhaps a little lacking in
liveliness--hotels, villas, and even the Kursaal all closely boarded
up with lead-coloured shutters. Only other person on Promenade a
fisher-boy scrooping over the tiles in _sabots_. I come to a glazed
shelter, and find the seats choked with drifting sand, and protected
with barbed wire. This depresses me. I did not want to sit down--but
the barbed wire _does_ seem needlessly unkind. Walk along the
sand-dunes; must pass the time somehow till dinner, and the arrival of
my luggage. Wonder whether it really _was_ labelled "Ostend." Suppose
the porter thought I said "Rochester" ... in that case--I will _not_
worry about it like this. I will go back and see the town.

I have; it is like a good many other foreign towns. I am melancholy.
I _can't_ dismiss that miserable luggage from my mind. To be alone
in a foreign land, without so much as a clean sock, is a distressing
position for a sensitive person. If I could only succeed in seeing a
humorous element in it, it would be _something_--but I can't. It is
too forlorn to be at all funny. And there is still an hour and a half
to get through before dinner!