I mention these things as some of the light notes, but the picture is never too empty for a stronger one not to sound. The strongest, at Dunwich, is indeed one that, without in the least falsifying the scale, counts immensely for filling in. The palm in the rustic sports is for the bluejackets; as, in England, of course, nothing is easier than for the village green to alternate with the element that Britannia still more admirably rules. I had often dreamed that the ideal refuge for a man of letters was a cottage so placed on the coast as to be circled, as it were, by the protecting arm of the Admiralty. I remember to have heard it said in the old country—in New York and Boston—that the best place to live in is next to an engine-house, and it is on this analogy that, at Dunwich, I have looked for ministering peace in near neighbourhood to one of those stations of the coast-guard that, round all the edge of England, at short intervals, on rock and sand and heath, make, with shining whitewash and tar, clean as a great state is at least theoretically clean, each its own little image of the reach of the empire. It is in each case an image that, for one reason and another, you respond to with a sort of thrill; and the thing becomes as concrete as you can wish on your discovering in the three or four individual members of the simple staff of the establishment all sorts of educated decency and many sorts of beguilement to intercourse. Prime among the latter, in truth, is the great yarn-spinning gift. It differs from man to man, but here and there it glows like a cut ruby. May the last darkness close before I cease to care for sea-folk!—though this, I hasten to add, is not the private predilection at which, in these incoherent notes, I proposed most to glance. Let me have mentioned it merely as a sign that the fault is all my own if, this summer, the arm of the Admiralty has not, in the full measure of my theory, represented the protection under which the long literary morning may know—abyss of delusion!—nothing but itself. DUNWICH, August 31, 1879. [Illustration] INDEX Abergavenny, 247. “Adam Bede,” locality of, 216, 217. Aldeburgh, birthplace of Crabbe, 323, 324. Apsley House, 20, 21. Arnold, Matthew, 24; “The Sick King in Bokhara,” quoted, 29. Avon River, 90. Baillie, Joanna, 44. Banbury, 218. Becket, Thomas A’, his assassination at Canterbury, 149, 150; his shrine, 150, 151. Belgravia, 15, 16; in dog-days, 154. Blackheath, the Common, 168. Black Prince, the (_see_ Edward Plantagenet). Blunderstone, 318, 319. Bonchurch, 253, 254. Brighton, 278; gaiety of, 279. Broughton Castle, 219, 220. Browning, Robert, 51-59. Buckingham Palace, 21, 23. Bury St. Edmunds, 266; ruined abbey at, 267. Cambridge University, famous chapel of King’s College, 264, 265.