few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships
came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were
bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown,
in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad
living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets
were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no
better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and
ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the
Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their
defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most
fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little nest. And the time
came when it was disturbed....

Even the Pol, a handsome river enough out beyond the town in the reaches
of the woods, was no pretty sight at low tide when there was nothing to
see but a thin, sluggish grey stream filtering through banks of mud to its
destination, the sea. At high tide the river beat up against the crazy
stone wall that bordered Pennicent Street; and on the further side there
were green fields and a rising hill with a feathery wood to crown it. From
the river, coming up through the green banks, Seatown looked picturesque,
with its disordered cottages scrambling in confusion at the tail of the
rock and the Cathedral and Castle nobly dominating it. That distant view
is the best thing to be said for Seatown.

To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk
plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of
the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and
bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent
Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the
river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were