brine to the determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an
appetite that rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite of
certain frank whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the common
to mingle with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and gentleman
entering the town to take lodgings for a month, and that on the morrow
they took a boat from the shore, saying in their faint English to a
sailor veteran of the coastguard, whom they had consulted about the
weather, "It is better zis zan zat," as they shrugged between rough sea
and corpselike land. And they were not seen again. Their meaning none
knew. Having paid their bill at the lodging-house, their conduct was
ascribed to systematic madness. English people came to Crikswich for the
pure salt sea air, and they did not expect it to be cooked and dressed
and decorated for them. If these things are done to nature, it is nature
no longer that you have, but something Frenchified. Those French are for
trimming Neptune's beard! Only wait, and you are sure to find variety in
nature, more than you may like. You will find it in Neptune. What say
you to a breach of the sea-wall, and an inundation of the aromatic grass-
flat extending from the house on the beach to the tottering terraces,
villas, cottages: and public-house transformed by its ensign to Hotel,
along the frontage of the town? Such an event had occurred of old, and
had given the house on the beach the serious shaking great Neptune in his
wrath alone can give. But many years had intervened. Groynes had been
run down to intercept him and divert him. He generally did his winter
mischief on a mill and salt marshes lower westward. Mr. Tinman had
always been extremely zealous in promoting the expenditure of what moneys
the town had to spare upon the protection of the shore, as it were for
the propitiation or defiance of the sea-god. There was a kindly joke
against him an that subject among brother jurats. He retorted with the
joke, that the first thing for Englishmen to look to were England's
defences.