"I always come," he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat.
It isn't here."

And when he said that I understood him perfectly.

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred
to the people who live there. I myself have never come
to the end of the list of Batterseas. But there are two to
the stranger and tourist; the poor part, which is dignified,
and the prosperous part, which is savagely vulgar.
My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost;
to the latter he would only distantly allude.

"The place is very much spoilt now . . . trippers, you know,"
he would say, not at all scornfully, but simply sadly.
That was the nearest he would go to an admission of the monstrous
watering place that lay along the front, outblazing the sun,
and more deafening than the sea. But behind--out of earshot
of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow that they seem
like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose.
There are squares so brimful of silence that to plunge into one
of them is like plunging into a pool. In these places the man
and I paced up and down talking about Dickens, or, rather,
doing what all true Dickensians do, telling each other verbatim
long passages which both of us knew quite well already.
We were really in the atmosphere of the older England.
Fishermen passed us who might well have been characters
like Peggotty; we went into a musty curiosity shop and
bought pipe-stoppers carved into figures from Pickwick.
The evening was settling down between all the buildings