I ONCE went down to Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, with a party of friends, which included an American writer, himself as delightful and charming as his stories. Why should I not give his name? It was Cable, the author of "Old Creole Days." We walked through the little town to the sea-front, and came upon the immense beach spreading out for miles towards Orford Ness. "Well, I never!" said he to me; "I suppose the hotel people have put those stones there to make a promenade for the visitors. It's a big thing." It took me some time to persuade him that they were brought there by the sea and spread out by it alone. It was his first visit to Europe, but he had seen the seashore on the other side, and there was nothing like this over there, he declared. A similar readiness to ascribe Nature's handiwork to the enterprise of hotel-keepers led a visitor to the Bel Alp, in the Rhone Valley, when he looked down from that high-placed hostelry on to the great Aletsch glacier, with its central "moraine" of huge rock masses and debris, to exclaim, "I see the proprietor has spread a cinder-path along the glacier to prevent us from slipping. It's a convenience, no doubt, but gives a nasty dirty look to the snow." Mr. Cable, when he once realized that the great Aldeburgh beach was a natural production, did what a true poet and naturalist must do--he fell in love with it, and spent hours in filling his pockets with strange-looking pebbles of all kinds until he was brought into the house to dinner by main force, when he spread his collection on the table, and demanded an explanation of "what, whence, and why" in regard to each pebble. Our companions--a great lawyer, a military hero, a politician, and two "learned men"--regarded him as eccentric, not to say childish. But I entirely sympathized with him, and when next day we sailed down to Orford and stood in front of the old Norman fortress, he further established himself in my regard by deeply sighing and exclaiming, "So that is a real English castle!" whilst several large tears quietly streamed down his undisturbed countenance.