I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the Stour
valley above the town, all horrible with cement works and foully smoking
chimneys and rows of workmen's cottages, minute, ugly, uncomfortable,
and grimy. So I had my first intimation of how industrialism must live
in a landlord's land. I spent some hours, too, in the streets that give
upon the river, drawn by the spell of the sea. But I saw barges and
ships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and
coal. The sailors looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shipping
struck me as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sails
don't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as pitiful
and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a man. When I
saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the hold filling up silly
little sacks and the succession of blackened, half-naked men that ran to
and fro with these along a plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and
mud, I was first seized with admiration of their courage and toughness
and then, "But after all, WHY--?" and the stupid ugliness of all this
waste of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it
obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had imagined great
things of the sea!

Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.

But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no excess.
Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp, and my evenings
and nights perforce in the company of the two eldest of my cousins.
He was errand boy at an oil shop and fervently pious, and of him I saw
nothing until the evening except at meals; the other was enjoying the
midsummer holidays without any great elation; a singularly thin and
abject, stunted creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend