To the traveller who has grown familiar with the centre of Africa; to that bold explorer who has spent lonely days and nights amidst those darksome forests in which the forgotten cities of America lie buried; to the prisoner newly released from solitary confinement in the great prison-house of New York, so pleasantly entitled the Tombs--to one of these a newly discovered watering-place may not appear dull. He who has been used to hear no more familiar voice than the distant cry of the bittern, far away amongst the swampy wildernesses, may endure Herne Bay and live. The criminal who has undergone a decade of solitary confinement in the Tombs may possibly survive a month at Southend: but to the ordinary mind there is a modern abomination of desolation lurking in the unfinished terraces of a budding watering-place, or in a watering-place which has put forth its tender blossoms in the way of bow-windowed receptacles for the concentrated bleakness of perpetual east winds, and has been blighted in the bud. Coltonslough was very young; it was in the most infantine stage of watering-place existence. Speculative builders had bought half-a-dozen plots of swamp and mud, and had erected dismal rows of houses, which turned their backs upon one another, and started off at right angles from one another, in utter contempt for all uniformity. If the melancholy sojourner at Coltonslough was of an active turn of mind, he was apt to be tormented by a wild desire to pull down and re-arrange those straggling terraces, between which stretched hideous deserts of waste ground, with here and there a lurking pitfall, whence gravel, or sand, or clay, or chalk, had been dug by unknown persons, who seemed always digging something or other out of Coltonslough, whereby an appearance of volcanic disruption was imparted to a place whose chief merit had been its agreeable flatness.