It was very young. A few straggling excursionists came on the blazing summer Sundays, and prowled about the shore with countenances expressive of supreme disappointment and disgust. Half-a-dozen families of cockney children were wont to congregate by the dismal waters every summer, provided with baskets for the collection of shells--and there were no shells at Coltonslough,--and further provided with wooden spades for the undermining of sand--and there was no sand at that baby watering-place. Families did certainly come, beguiled by representations of impossibly cheap provisions, though the place was in reality very expensive, for every tradesman was a monopolist on a small scale. Families came, but no family ever came a second time to Coltonslough; and it may be that, in the wonderful scheme of the universe, this new-born watering-place was not without its special use; inasmuch as it made people contented with London. The inhabitant of Bermondsey, returning to that locality after a sojourn at Coltonslough, found beauties in some dismal street which until that hour had appeared to his prosaic mind a street, and nothing more. The denizen of Ratcliff Highway sat down amongst his household gods well pleased with a neighbourhood which, although not unobjectionable, was a paradise as compared with Coltonslough. It was to this place of desolation that a newly-finished offshoot of the railway then known as the Eastern Counties conveyed Francis Tredethlyn. He went to look for his cousin with no better clue to help him in his search than that one word, “Coltonslough,” copied from the post-mark of Susan’s letter. “But I won’t be baffled,” the young man thought, as he sat in the railway carriage thinking of the task that lay before him. “Coltonslough may be a big place, but I’ll question every living creature in it before I’ll give up the chance of finding out something about my cousin.” Luckily for Mr. Tredethlyn’s chances, Coltonslough was a very small place, and after walking backwards and forwards for some quarter of an hour, before the emporium of the one butcher; the solitary baker, who dabbled a little in the fruit and confectionery line; and the single grocer, who was also a linendraper, and beyond that a stationer, who had a side of bacon hanging on one side of his door, and a piece of showy cotton stuff upon the other, and who moreover was sole master of the Coltonslough post-office,--Francis determined upon his plan of action. He had thought of his cousin very constantly in the few days before his visit to Mr. Hillary’s mansion; he had thought of her a great deal since then, though he had not found it quite so easy to concentrate his ideas, by reason of a certain bright face and slender figure all in a flutter of white and blue, that would sometimes intrude themselves upon his meditations.