_At the Hotel._--Find, on getting out of the omnibus, that the Hotel is being painted; entrance blocked by ladders and pails. Squeeze past, and am received in the hall by the Proprietress and a German Waiter. "Certainly they can give me a room--my baggage shall be taken up immed--" Here I have to explain that this is impracticable, as my baggage has unfortunately been left behind. Think I see a change in their manner at this. A stranger who comes abroad with nothing but a stick and an umbrella cannot _expect_ to inspire confidence, I suppose. I remark to the Waiter that the luggage is sure to follow me by the next boat, but it strikes even myself that I do not bring this out with quite a sincere ring. Not at all the manner of a man who possesses a real portmanteau. I order dinner--the kind of dinner, I feel, that a man who did not intend to pay for it _would_ order. I detect this impression in the Waiter's eye. If he dared, I know he would suggest tea and a boiled egg as more seemly under the circumstances. _On the Digue._--Thought, it being holiday time, that there would be more gaiety; but Ostend just now perhaps a little lacking in liveliness--hotels, villas, and even the Kursaal all closely boarded up with lead-coloured shutters. Only other person on Promenade a fisher-boy scrooping over the tiles in _sabots_. I come to a glazed shelter, and find the seats choked with drifting sand, and protected with barbed wire. This depresses me. I did not want to sit down--but the barbed wire _does_ seem needlessly unkind. Walk along the sand-dunes; must pass the time somehow till dinner, and the arrival of my luggage. Wonder whether it really _was_ labelled "Ostend." Suppose the porter thought I said "Rochester" ... in that case--I will _not_ worry about it like this. I will go back and see the town. I have; it is like a good many other foreign towns. I am melancholy. I _can't_ dismiss that miserable luggage from my mind. To be alone in a foreign land, without so much as a clean sock, is a distressing position for a sensitive person. If I could only succeed in seeing a humorous element in it, it would be _something_--but I can't. It is too forlorn to be at all funny. And there is still an hour and a half to get through before dinner! I have dined--in a small room, with a stove, a carved buffet, and a portrait of the King of the BELGIANS; but my spirits are still low. German Waiter dubious about me; reserving his opinion for the present. He comes in with a touch of new deference in his manner. "Please, a man from de shdation for you." I go out--to find the sympathetic Porter. My baggage has arrived? It has; it is at the Douane, waiting for me. I am saved! I tell the Waiter, without elation, but with what, I trust, is a calm dignity--the dignity of a man who has been misunderstood, but would scorn to resent it.