Those who explore this corner of old Hastings will acquire odd pieces of information from the fisherfolk. Rock-a-Nore, it will be found from them, and from one’s own personal experience, is the coldest place in the town; and, although they are not responsive to “Chop-backs,” they tell you that “Bourne” (_i.e._ Eastbourne) men are “Winnicks.” They look with disapproval on the new harbour-works; and are, indeed, true Conservatives, for they instinctively think any change to be inevitably for the worse. Were I a fisherman I should, at any rate, resent the inference of the Mission Church planted on the beach, in their midst, as though an outpost of Christianity among the heathen. And such a mildewed, blue-mouldy, repellent building! But perhaps the situation, at the remote end—the _cul-de-sac_—of the beach, suggested the idea of paganism, piracy, and all sorts of unchristian things, at Rock-a-Nore; but if it be true that _Labore est orare_, then the fishermen are on more certain ground than many of the prayerful people who missionise them. This is indeed, geographically, a dead-end, under the grey-white cliffs of East Hill; and being so, the Hastings Corporation have planted here those undesirable things—a mortuary and a dust-shoot. Next door to the mortuary you see the grim, unconscious humour of a warehousing firm’s announcement, “Tapner and Co. for Removals,” and at the end of all things, where a gigantic stone and concrete groyne projects into the sea, there is the town dust-destructor. Beyond is the perilous beach to Ecclesbourne, where the toppling cliffs above and the treacherous tide below often offer the unwary the unwelcome choice of being crushed or drowned. LIII On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those chalk cliffs themselves. It is a long, a circuitous, and an arduous climb to the eyrie where that battered stronghold is perched, and although superior persons scorn and abuse the lift that brings you swiftly and without toil to that height, the elderly and the unduly fleshy, Hamlet-like persons among them, “fat and scant of breath,” take advantage of it, and archæologise easefully by the aid of modern mechanism. But little remains to arouse enthusiasm or to employ the pencil of the artist, and that which might have been, from its situation, as imposing as the Castle of Dover itself, is but the matter of a few speculative arches and grizzled masonry.