It was the sound of heels on the Pier. From one end of it to the other they walked, past the recesses and lamp-standards and the bright kiosks where tobacco and confectionery and walking-sticks and picture-postcards and souvenirs were sold, and then they turned and walked back. After a time the drub-drubbing became curiously hypnotising. At moments it conformed almost to a regular rhythm; then it broke up again into mere confusion, out of which another metrical beat would rise for a second or so and then become lost again. For long spaces the ear would become accustomed and cease to hear it, and would take in instead the lighter registers of tittering, soft laughter, the striking of matches and an occasional scuffle and call; but the groundwork of sound would break through again, like a muffled drum tapped by many performers at once, monotonous, reverberating, dead---- Drub-drub-drub--drub-drub--drub-drub---- It was half-past eight of a July night. Crowded as the Pier was, it would become still more so when the Concert Hall just within the turnstiles, and the Pavilion at the pier-head, turned out their audiences again. There would hardly be space to move them. The Promenade was a sweep of brilliants; Gardd Street lay unseen behind it under a golden haze; behind that again the lighted rosette of the Big Wheel turned slowly high in the sky; and the great hotels of the front were squared and mascled with window-lights. All this dance of gold and silver made an already blue evening intensely blue, and the Pier was so long that, even with quick walking, several minutes passed between your losing the rattle of hand-clapping outside the Concert Hall at one end of it, and your picking up the strains of the Pavilion orchestra at the other. Drub-drub-drub--drub-drub-drub--drub-drub---- There was hardly a bed to be had in Llanyglo. Visitors who had rashly chosen to take their chance commonly passed their first night in the waiting-rooms of the railway station. Servant-girls lay in their clothes under kitchen tables, while their own garrets were let for half a sovereign a night. Dozens slept on sofas, chairs, hearthrugs, billiard-tables, on the Promenade benches, under the tarpaulins of wagonettes and chars-à-bancs, or curled up in the boats on the shore. They Boxed-and-coxed it as they could, and the police did not trouble to shake the slumberers on whom they turned their bull's-eyes in the nooks and arbours of the Floral Valley. Drub-drub-drub--drub--drub---- And who were they now, they whose heels wore down the Pier timbers and made the brain drowsy with their ceaseless tramp?