To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were broken, their panes stuffed with paper; washing hung from house to house. The windows that were not broken were hermetically sealed and filled with grimy plants and ferns, and here and there a photograph of an embarrassed sailor or a smiling married couple or an overdressed young woman placed face outward to the street. Bridge Street tumbled with a dirty absent- mindedness into Pennicent Street. This, the main thoroughfare of Seatown, must have been once a handsome cobbled walk by the river-side. The houses, more than in Bridge Street, showed by their pillared doorways and their faded red brick that they had once been gentlemen's residences, with gardens, perhaps, running to the river's edge and a fine view of the meadows and woods beyond. To-day all was shrouded in a mist that was never stationary, that seemed alive in its shifting movement, revealing here a window, there a door, now a chimney-pot, now steps that seemed to lead into air, and the river, now at full tide and lapping the stone wall, seemed its drunken bewildered voice. "Bally pawns, that's what we are," Falk muttered again. It seemed to be the logical conclusion of the thoughts that had worried him, like flies, during his walk. Some one lurched against him as he stayed for a moment to search for the inn. A hot spasm of anger rose in him, so sudden and fierce that he was frightened by it, as though he had seen his own face in a mirror. But he said nothing. "Sorry," said a voice, and shadow faded into shadow. He found the "Dog and Pilchard" easily enough. Just beyond it the river was caught into a kind of waterfall by a ridge of stone that projected almost into mid-stream. At high tide it tumbled over this obstruction with an astonished splash and gurgle. Even when the river was at its lowest there was a dim chattering struggle at this point. Falk always connected this noise with the inn and the power or enchantment of the inn that held him--"Black Enchantment," perhaps. He was to hear that struggling chatter of the river until his dying day.