The grandest view of Hastings is that of the Old Town from hard by the modern, but picturesque, Lifeboat House, whence you see the great East Hill looming magnificently up above the huddled houses that, whether they be of old red brick or tarred wood, are all, in the mass, artistically “right.” It is, in the summer, a crowded quarter, for the excursionists who feel a little abashed by the stucco magnificences and primnesses of newer Hastings and St. Leonards, and cannot elsewhere come into close communion with the untamed sea, find here an ideal dumping-ground for babies and provision-baskets. Here, thanks to modern masonry groynes, a fine mass of beach is gradually accumulating, in heaped-up plenty. But it is not a crowded beach and a sunny sky that give the artist his chance at this point. His opportunity comes at those times when most folk would choose to be under shelter; when the rainbow arches in the leaden sky, the domestic washing of the Old Town flaps wetly in the squalls, and the distant tackle-boxes and the bell-turret of the Fishermen’s Church stand out almost in the blackness of silhouettes. Then the East Hill looks all its size, and more. Unhappily, brutal things have been done in modern times to East Hill and West, in the cutting of shafts through the chalk for lifts; and the scar thus made in the face of the East Hill is, from many points, atrociously prominent; while day-trippers have even been known to mistake the embattled lift-station on the sky-line up there for the Castle. LII But sketchable at every turn is the Stade: the very reverse of St. Leonards, whose formal houses and formal people no one would choose to sketch or interest one’s self in. Here is the “Dolphin” inn, the “House for sea-wonders,” with an amazing fish from some distant clime hanging, very goggle-eyed and finny, and very dry, by the door; and, no doubt, stranger sights within. Beside it are “Tamarisk Steps.” Who is there would not, for sheer love of their names, explore Tamarisk Steps and Tackleway, that goes inland, parallel with All Saints’ Street, to the back of All Saints’ itself? [Illustration: OLD TACKLE-BOXES, HASTINGS.]