The elements at Hastings are at odds with the Board of Trade, which has forbidden the Corporation to take beach from the foreshore. Winds, waves, and currents deposit shingle in the roadway, and it has then to be cleared up; and, since the Government Department cannot require it to be replaced, it is sold. According to the town accounts for 1904, the Town Council in that year made £24 out of 120 tons of beach washed up in this way. The sea in this Old Town corner of Hastings is undoubtedly the “ever fresh, the ever free” of the poet: the rolling ocean, the heaving billow, and everything adjectival in the marine sort. It is unquestionably that which you fail in many places of the Eastbourne type quite to realise: the home of little sprats and great whales; the cruising-ground of fisher-boats, steamships, and navies, no less than of the _Albertine_, the _New Albertine_, and the _Favourite_ sailing-yachts, on which you get very seasick for the ridiculous sum of a shilling an hour. The sea is that which your point of view makes it: home of the guardian fleets; a course upon which steamships earn dividends for their owners; the grave of thousands of drowned sailors; or fishing-ground for trawlers and seiners. For what were you created? Answer, wild waves! For the delight of the midsummer child, with spade and bucket, and clothes tucked up; to enable the railway companies to run excursions to the “resorts” risen by the edge of you? What, on balance, are you: blessing or curse? You render our shores inviolate, but your sundering straits and oceans perpetuate Babel and maintain conflicting nationalities. Were it not for you and St. George’s Channel there would be no Ireland, and consequently no Home Rule Question. For that, at any rate, we owe you a grudge—and must, since we cannot yet shift to fill that Channel up—continue to owe it. [Illustration: HASTINGS OLD TOWN.] This is the Stade, where the fisher-town exists, sufficient to itself, self-contained, and quite as apart in feeling, manners and customs, from the modern town and St. Leonards as though it were sundered by gulfs and distances, instead of just adjoining. Not a gulf, in fact, but something in the way of a mountain—the West Hill—intervenes, and only by the narrow line of George Street, Pelham Place, and Castle Street is ready communication open. It is sufficiently ready, but new town and old have different ideals in life, and agree to mingle over that thoroughfare threshold only when business calls. In the unconventional streets of the Old Town you lounge in the sunshine at open windows, or squat in unconcerned deshabille on doorsteps, gossiping across the width of the road; in modern Hastings the streets are of a greater width, but the manners are more strait, and you do not gaze forth from windows or exchange scandal with the house opposite.