up and down, beacons to be climbed, and Roman mounds and ditches. We had hoped to walk upon a ridge and count the spires of sheltered villages. Our road to Brighton crept in a lowland along the railroad track and held no invitation for the eye. Our friend George was a musician, a pianist, the organist of a city church, whose talents would already have made him famous except for his modesty and the ill fortune of the war.

It was but a morning's walk to Brighton, but the day was overcast with promise of rain and so we went by bus. These journeys of quick explosion are too rapid for impressions; for the eye is a sluggish camera even if the day is sunny, and it declines to record a picture except on a time-exposure. I recall only that there were three girls on the bus, all clad in identical shawls as if their mother had pooled her offspring at a bargain counter. All else is a smudge of running trees and poles-villages pelting up to London for the sights.

"How I love a walking trip!" said Bill, as he stretched his feet to the seat in front. And so we rattled on, until the city came in sight.

Brighton passed its innocent youth as a fishing village. It was Brighthelmstone then and was little more than a distant suburb of the older town of Lewes—a range of dingy houses on the beach where boats were stranded by the falling tide and nets were strung on poles to dry.

But it happened that a certain Richard Russell, physician of Lewes, published in seventeen hundred and fifty a book on sea water as a cure for this and

that-how it healed among other ailments a faulty lung. It was doubtless a tome of hard and learned phrase, but of such persuasion that presently many of his patients threw away his former lotion, packed their bags, called out the family horse and bounced to the ocean to renew their health. I fancy that this exodus (so far beyond his intention) must have cut his golden fees, for in seventeen fifty-four-his inland snuggery being now bare of patients- he also made the journey with all his domestic appurtenance and hung out a new shingle near the beach for reviving profit. On the sand all day his patients sat until the salty tang restored their health, and happily once more there was a gold deposit beneath the shingle.

And this was the beginning of Brighton's greatness; for in the course of time its good report spread to London, became the gossip at dinner tables and fetched back a sprinkling of pasty folk who wasted in the smoke. And among them, no doubt, were persons of high position; perhaps a Duchess even with a cough, to sit upon the beach and drink tea beneath her parasol.

Such persons must be entertained, for convalescence has its lazy hour and turns to games of chance and sport. So balls were contrived, and masquerades to ape the vanity of London. In seventeen hundred and eighty-three the Prince of Wales, just one and twenty, alive for dissipation, came also to test the waters; and this newest place of pleasure by his patronage became the vogue. A pier was built, a ballroom, a gilded hall

for gambling.

All of the English cures and baths arose at the nod of

royalty. Tunbridge Wells took its start when a Queen's coach rattled in for lodging. Popularity came to Epsom when Charles II built a palace two miles away to house a mistress. The waters of Bath had spouted up with complete neglect for a thousand years, but they regained their Roman prestige when Queen Anne pronounced here an inner comfort.

And so it was with Brighton. So charmed was his fat highness by a brief prospect of the English Channel, so soothed by its salty air, that in seventeen eighty-four he sent his cook ahead from London to engage a house. And presently he designed and built a palace here for his holidays. This still stands and is known as the Pavilion-a museum now with entrance for a fee, for tides of fashion rise and fall.

We saw it from the bus as we rattled in.

"My sainted grandmother!" cried Bill. "What horrid thing is that?"

It is a Moorish structure of minaret and exotic decoration, but of a tawdry cheapness as if bricks and honest native wood were ashamed of their perversity. Nothing could be less suited to its setting. It is a touch of Bagdad at contract price, surrounded all about with common tourist lodgings. It is a scene-painter's nightmare of an eastern paradise.

Was this same Prince of Wales really an Englishman and the fat fellow who took snuff and rollicked with Beau Brummel? I seem to remember that Aladdin once fell to the dark glance of a Sultan's princess and that their course of love ran rough. He rubbed his lamp for remedy and called upon the genie to build him

a palace in the night to bear off the princess while she slept. I had thought that their flight was eastward across the Chinese mountains. Yet here is a Moorish palace quite lost and out of place. A wall is cracked as if in the giddy journey oversea or did the genie scamp construction in his haste? One must believe that Aladdin sickened at last of the foggy English climate and led his bride home from these barren walls to seek pardon and the sun.

Be that as it may, royal tenants have departed, and the spacious rooms and corridors are come to vulgar use while trippers gape upon their tawdry splendor.

But evidence exists of a time not so long ago when this building was held in awe. A hundred years back there lived in Brighton a certain George Richardson, who was at first a silk salesman behind a counter, then a geologist, scholar and an actor. He wrote a sonnet, The Pavilion.

O, I would roam around thy turrets, while
They bask in moonlight beauty, while Romance
Wakes the high visions of the holiest trance,
And bids her fairest forms the night beguile.

This and more! But at noon the Pavilion is as bare of holy trance as any set of stage scenery that is exposed to daylight in an alley at the stage door.

And so the Prince of Wales came down to Brighton, and fashion set up its rule. There were masked balls, and games of chance, ogling, omber, dancing, drinking and intrigue. Theaters were built for London companies. The beach became a parade for flounce and