Beachborough, where, in obedience to the strident voice of the railway
porter--voice combining the hardness of the Dorset with the drawl of
the Devon dialect--you, if you be so disposed, "Change for Sandington
Cove and Waverley," is a very different place from what it was even
ten years ago. To be sure the sea is there, and the beach, and the
fishing-luggers with the red sails; but in everything else what
changes! Now there is, as has been said, a railway-station, a forlorn
little oasis of white planking in a desert of sandy heath, inhabited
by a clerk--a London young man, who "went too fast" in the metropolis,
and has been relegated to Beachborough as a good healthy place where
there is no chance of temptation--and a porter, a native of the place,
a muscular person great at wrestling, who is always inviting the male
passers-by of his acquaintance to "come on," and supplying them, on
their doing so, with a very ugly throw known as a "back-fall." There
are not many passers-by, for the newly-formed road leads to no where in
particular, and those who tramp through its winter slush, or struggle
through its summer dust, are generally either tradesmen of the place
anxious about overdue parcels, or servants, sent to make inquiries
about the trains, from some of the houses on the Esplanade.
The Esplanade! Heavens! if old Miss Gollop, who lived at the Baths,
and who used to supply very hot water and very damp towels, and the
greatest number of draughts ever known to be got together into one
small room, to the half-dozen county families to whom Beachborough
was then known as a watering-place--if old Miss Gollop could revisit
the glimpses of the moon, and by its light look upon the Esplanade,
it would, I am certain, be impossible for that worthy old lady to
recognise it as Mussared's Meadow, where she picked cowslips and
sucked sorrel when she was a girl, and which was utterly untainted by
the merest suspicion of brick and mortar when she died twenty years
ago. She would not recognise it any more than in The Dingo Arms--that
great white-faced establishment, with its suites of apartments, its
coffee-room, wine-office, private bar, and great range of stabling,
patronised by, and in its _sanctum sanctorum_ bearing an heraldic
emblazonment of the arms of, Sir Hercules Dingo Dingo, Bart., bloody
hand, four-quartered shield and all--she would have recognised The
Hoy, a tiny "public" where they used to sell the hardest beer and
the most stomach-ache-provoking cider, and which in her day was
the best tavern in the village. The white-faced terrace has sprung
up in Mussared's Meadow; the Esplanade in front of it is a seawall
and a delightful promenade for the Misses Gimp's young ladies, who
are the admiration of Dingo Terrace, and who have deadly rivals in
Madame de Flahault's _demoiselles_, whose piano-playing is at once
the delight and the curse of Powler Square; the cliffs, once so gaunt
and barren and forlorn, are dotted over with cottages and villakins,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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