the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon.

At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot.

"Move me," she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade
for fifteen minutes. And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens." At
the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the
chair there in the bright strip.

An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs. Barfoot--
James Coppard's daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street joins
Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time of
Queen Victoria's jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipal
watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds of
solicitors' consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited the
Aquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had caught the shark
quite well), and when the men came by with the posters she eyed them
superciliously, for she knew that she would never see the Pierrots, or
the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of performing seals. For
Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a prisoner--
civilization's prisoner--all the bars of her cage falling across the
esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery stores, the
swimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with shadow.

An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand a little behind her,
smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions--who people were--who now
kept Mr. Jones's shop--then about the season--and had Mrs. Dickens
tried, whatever it might be--the words issuing from her lips like crumbs
of dry biscuit.