When a great liner came round the Foreland, you ran to the telescope to see whether it was a P. and O., a Red Star or a Hamburg-Amerika. You soon got to recognize the majestic four-funnelled _Deutschland_ as she moved rapidly up or down the Channel. The yellow-funnelled boats for Ostend, the white-funnelled boats for Calais and Folkestone were daily events, hardly to be noted—and yet how they seemed to lure one to that unknown life across the narrow seas. On clear days you could see the faint shining of the cliffs of France. On foggy nights, the prolonged anapæst of the Foreland Lightship fog-horn answered the hoarse spondees of the passing ships, groping their way up channel. Even on the most rainy or most moonlit night, the flash of the lighthouse made dabs of yellow light on the walls of George’s bedroom. There were no nightingales at Martin’s Point, but morning and evening thrushes and blackbirds. Hamborough was so different, lying off the chalk downs on the edge of the salt marshes, the desolate, silent, unresponsive, salt marshes, so gorgeous at sunset. The tidal river ran turbid and level with its banks, or deep between walls of sinister mud. Little flocks of fleet-winged grey-white birds—called “oxey-birds”—flickered rapidly away in front of you on sickle-moon wings. A brown-sailed barge, far inland, seemed to be gliding overland through the flat green-brown marsh land. Behind, far across the flat desolate ex-sea-bottom ran the old coast line, and on a bluff stood the solid ruins of a Roman fort. “Pe-e-e-wit,” said the plunging plovers, “pee-e-ee-wit.” No other sound. The white clouds, dappled English clouds, moved so silently over the cool blue English skies; such faint blue, even on what the English call a “hot” day. You went to the marshes by way of the Barbican, the Barbican through which the old English Kings and knights had ridden with their men-at-arms, when they made one of their innumerable descents on more civilized France. There stood the mediæval Barbican, on the verge of the commonplace little money-grubbing town, like a stranded vestige from some geological past. What was the Barbican to early twentieth-century Hamborough? An obstacle to the new motor road, whose abolition was always being discussed in the Town Council, and whose destruction was only postponed because the thickness of the walls made it too expensive. On the other side you walked out into flat fertile country, past almshouses, and the hoary stone-mullioned Elizabethan Grammar School, over the level crossing, to Saxon Friedasburg, where tradition said a temple to Freya had once stood. How silver-grey the distant sea-fringe, how silver-grey the lines of rippling poplars! How warmly golden, like Priscilla, the wheat fields under the late August afternoon sunshine!