|COVETON--well known to ancient coupled who took their first honeymoons half a century ago--is one of those old-fashioned sea-side places that resolutely refuse to be “improved,” and the denizens of which affect to speak of Brighton as Brighthelmstone, and to treat it as a rival upon equal terms. It has two very pretty inns, but there is so little competition between them, that there is a shrewd suspicion that they are under the same management; a few more houses have been built, it is true, within the last half century, but they are all constructed upon that same principle of fancy architecture, adopted at Coveton from the first, and which perhaps I may term the Lowther Arcadian. At least I am sure that the models of all its dwelling-houses are to be found in that respectable metropolitan emporium: weather indicators, built for the accommodation of an unencumbered couple; churches for the dressing-table, in the front elevation of which you hang your watch before retiring to rest; villa residences, down whose chimneys you drop halfpence (or half-crowns, if you are so minded), for the encouragement of missionary enterprise; and gritty erections for all sorts of ingenious purposes, but which to the Uninstructed suggest only the means of lighting a cigarmatch. You have no idea, unless you have been to Coveton, how odd is the effect of a real village to the construction of which these Lowther Arcadian principles have been applied; where the doctors, father and son, live in a Weather Indicator (only, of course, about five hundred times as big), and the former keeps indoors when it is wet, and the son goes out in all weathers; where a genuine clergyman lives in a magnified money-box, and you look up involuntarily at the upper windows, in the expectation of seeing _Help the Heathen_ running in a neat scroll between the first and second floors; and where the gritty church has a real clock in the very place where the hole was left in the model. The whole place looks, in short, as though some clever child had built it out of a box of fancy bricks, after the pattern of what he had seen on nursery mantel-pieces, or suspended from Christmas-trees.