“Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away.” Somebody ought one day to write the epic of Brighton, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett has written the epic of the Five Towns. Arnold Bennett has given us pictures of Brighton, it is true; and as for Sussex, no county has such a crowd of enthusiastic poets to sing its praise. But when I hear the word Sussex spoken, the picture it evokes for me has nothing to do with any of that lyrical enthusiasm. [Illustration: THE STEWARDS] I see a third-class railway carriage on a Monday morning full of bluejackets. They are travelling to London from Portsmouth. We have just left Horsham. One of them is looking out of the window; he observes a man sitting on a stile. “Nice easy job that bloke’s got,” the sailor observes, “watching the tortoises _flash_ by.” All this is suggested by the sight of Brighton where, at this very moment, while I am setting out to wander with the antipodes (the expression is Shakespeare’s), I know that two friends of mine are dining in that most comfortable of inns, the Royal York Hotel. I wish I were there.... While thus meditating on absent friends, somebody asks me if I play bridge. I say Yes. “Why did you say Yes?” I say to myself, groaning inwardly as I sit down to play. “You know you can’t play properly and that you’ll spoil the game.” Sure enough I revoke in the first game. However, in my prophetic soul the comforting thought arises that I shan’t be asked to play again. The next morning by breakfast time we have almost reached Plymouth. I know the coast we are passing between Bolt Head and Wembury Point, having been brought up in that little corner of land. I played on those beaches as a child, picnicked on those cliffs, played at robbers and smugglers in those caves. It is like a piece of a dream to see these familiar, these intimate rocks and cliffs, after so many years. The sea has that peculiar glitter as of a million golden scales, and the sky has something peculiar in the quality of its azure, something luminous, hazy, and radiant which seems to me to belong to the seas of South Devon, and to the seas of South Devon alone. Is this really so? Does it, I wonder, strike other people in the same way? Or is the impression I receive due to the unfading spell and the old glamour of childhood. There is a ruined church nestling in the rocks right down by the waves; there are the paths, and the pools, which were the playground of hundreds of games, and the battlefields of mimic warfare, and the temples of the long thoughts of boyhood. There are the spots which to childhood’s eye seemed one’s very own, a sacred and permanent possession, part and parcel of that larger entity of home which was then the centre of one’s universe, and seemed to be indestructible and everlasting.