dered if poets address their verses always to a real woman. For in practice, as here on the Hastings road, they must sometime in extremity conjure up a lady out of nothing to fit their wares.

And now, at home among my books, my measures seem to resemble other and better verses of a better poet. "When the lamp is shattered the light in the dust lies dead." Plagiarism surely cannot be judged a mortal sin when one advances so blithely and so innocently to the theft. So with rhymes and happy sadness I beguiled the lowland that lies along the ocean and climbed at last a hill to a stone gate-tower that guards the approach to Winchelsea.

Winchelsea, although it lies broadly in the sun, has yet an air of melancholy, as if it still wore a black ribbon on its arm for its parent buried in the sea. This calamity befell the older city in the year twelve hundred and fifty. "On the first day of October," Holinshed writes, "the moon, upon her change, appearing red and swelled, began to show tokens of the great tempest of wind that followed, which was so huge and mightie, both by land and sea, that the like had not been lightlie knowne, and seldome, or rather never heard of by men then alive. The sea forced contrarie to his natural course, flowed twice without ebbing, yeelding such a rooring that the same was heard (not without great woonder) a farre distance from the shore. Moreover, the same sea appeared in the darke of the night to burne, as it had been on fire, and the waves to strive and fight togither after a marvellous sort, so that the mariners could not devise

how to save their ships where they laie at anchor, by no cunning or shift which they could devise.'

Nor was Winchelsea alone destroyed. It is said that the salt spray was thrown in the tempest so far inland "that the next year's crops declined to grow, nor would the leaves of the trees and hedges put forth their full foliage."

Unlike Rye, the streets of Winchelsea are broad with much space for trees to arch above. The houses are not huddled with a neighbor's elbow in the ribs, but everywhere there is room for gardens. If Rye is crowded with houses that stand a tiptoe for the view, Winchelsea is of generous dimension, for the hill on which it stands is more than ample for its accommodation. Both of these towns took their rise from commerce and were of a burgher population of free privilege, unlike such places as Arundel which sprang from feudal circumstance under the eye of an aristocratic castle. Rye is still a busy market town with its remnant of wharves and shallow shipping on the river, but Winchelsea sits marooned upon its wooded upland and its thought turns entirely to the past. In the church that sets in its acre of softest turf there is a tomb of Gervase Alard who was Admiral of the Cinque Ports and a sailor of great repute in ancient battles.

Ellen Terry owns a cottage at Winchelsea and spends her summers here. I noticed a placard announcing that she was to recite at a garden fête for charity. And it happened that a friend of mine, coming here later, heard her and had the pleasure of paying his respects to this actress whose genius overtopped Henry Irving in

so many plays. Her eyes fail, he says, and she had difficulty in reading from a manuscript.

Thackeray lived once in a house alongside the graveyard and wrote Denis Duval here. Under a large tree in this same graveyard John Wesley preached his last

sermon.

A broad avenue leads around the church, and this I followed with a glance across my shoulder at the building's beauty. The branches arched overhead, to remind travelers that Gothic took its start with nature.

There is a sharp descent at the edge of town and for two hours I walked on a low ridge between the ocean and the marshes of the river Brede. In front of me lay the purple wall of the Downs, which plunges at Hastings to the sea to rise again in France in a similar ridge of chalk. And now my happy songs were quite forgotten in fatigue and I lay wagers with myself whether motors with an even number of passengers would exceed those with an uneven number-for this is a roadside cribbage for pedestrians who go alone when the brain grows dull. As the morning wore on a rising traffic thickened up my count.

And now a stone tower, that had signaled to me in the early morning and had been lost awhile, popped up beside me on a hill; for at last I had spanned the lowland by the sea.

At the town of Ore I was well up on the Downs, and from here to Hastings I walked through a broken two miles of scattered and unpleasing houses, with ginger beer for refreshment at a tavern by the road. A shabby street of boarding houses and cheap shops

plunged down the hill, and I was on the beach. A thousand awkward legs were taking the air in nature's raiment, and five thousand toes were buried in the sand. I had walked the twelve miles in less than three hours and I sat down hard at a corner restaurant where tables were exposed upon the curb. "Waitress," I bawled, "fetch me quick a pint of stout!"

O

JULIA FLOAY.

Few ships today are lost upon the sandy British coast

CHAPTER XII

TEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA

UR bodies shrink upon a mountain and yet on

any lofty peak there comes an increase to the

stature of our souls. Our minds here reach out beyond their usual grasp and run to the edge of nature; and Orion, despite its vastness, finds a lodging in the cabin of the eye. For, although we are a speck unnoticed, too small to be measured against the sky, yet we are endowed with an inheritance that builds castles in the twilight of a fancy, that finds beauty and a reason in the sun, the clouds and wind, the shifting color of the earth; that threads a pathway across a field of stars and knocks for answer on the black and sightless wall that bounds the universe. It has been written that we lift up our voice unto the hills whence comes our help, and here aloft in humility of spirit we stand at God's communion. A prospect from a head