all green porch and plate-glass windows; the old barn-like church has had a fresh tower put on to him, and a fresh minister--one with his ecclesiastical millinery of the newest cut, and up to the latest thing in genuflexions--put into him; there is a Roman Catholic chapel close to the old Wesleyan meeting-house; and they have modernised and spoiled the picturesque tower where Captain Derinzy wore away a portion of his days. Great improvements, no doubt. Pavement and gas, and two policemen, and a railway, and a ritualistic incumbent, and shops with plate-glass windows, where you can get Holloway's pills and Horniman's teas, and all the things without which no gentleman's table is complete. But the events of my story happened ten years ago, when the inhabitants of Beachborough--shopkeepers, fisher-people, villagers, and lace-makers--were like one family, and loved and hated and reviled and back-bit each other as the members of one family only can. We shall get a little insight into the village politics if we drop in for a few minutes at Mrs. Powler's long one-storied, thatched-roof cottage, standing by itself in the middle of the little High Street. Mrs. Powler is a rich and childless old widow, Powler deceased having done a little in the vending of home-manufactured lace, and a great deal in the importing, duty-free, of French lace and brandy. It was Powler's run when Bill Gollop, the black sheep of the Gollop family, was shot by the revenue-officer down by Wastewater Hole, a matter which Powler is scarcely thought to have compromised by giving a new organ to Bedminster church. However, he has been dead some years, and his widow is very rich and tolerably hospitable; and her little thatched cottage--she never lived in any other house--is the centre and focus of Beachborough gossip.