The place is recommended as “a quiet retreat for tired brain-workers,” and certainly there is nothing here to disturb or startle. Those who want to be amused--that great desideratum of the brainless and the uncultivated--will not come to St. Margaret’s Bay, or, if by any chance they do so, they speedily climb out of it again; that is to say, as speedily as the extravagantly steep road permits; but to those who have resources within themselves this untroubled strand has an enduring charm. I do not think a motor-car has ever been down here, which is so much to the good; plenty of them fuss and stink along the road above. No parade, or esplanade, or such formality affronts the dignity of the sea here, and although the more or less interesting fact may be gleaned that the London and Paris telephone-cable, completed in March 1891, lands here from Sangatte, on the French coast, one might well go in ignorance of it, so far as any visible evidence goes. One simply idles here, and reads and rests those tired brains--if one is happy enough to possess any. Almost unconsciously, like Mr. Silas Wegg, the idler drops into poetry: “Here spreads a little sheltered bay, Beneath the tall and windy downs, All undisturbed by nigger lay; Far from the clustered seaside towns. “Here haply by the world forgot I linger on the pebbly beach, And seat me where the sun is hot, And colour like the ripening peach. “Here workers come to rest their brains, O’erwrought in search of fame and pelf-- And so would I, to ease such strains, Did I possess some brains myself.” They have a saying down here in St. Margaret’s Bay that “the Channel is as well lighted as Regent Street,” and it is indeed on some dark evening a striking and a beautiful sight to gaze out across these waters upon the many lights flashing and sparkling out there; including not only those of the lightships and the lighthouses, but the lights of Ramsgate eleven miles away, twinkling quietly, the riding-lights of vessels at anchor in the Downs, and the brilliant illumination of some great liner surging past. Beyond the clustered lamps of Ramsgate flashes the occulting North Foreland light; and out to sea the position of the Goodwin Sands is marked by the Gull Lightship, with its recurrent flash every twenty seconds; the North Goodwin Lightship, with three flashes in quick succession; the brilliant South Goodwin, with its double flash every thirty seconds; the South Sand, visible ten miles; the East Goodwin, easily distinguished from its fellows by flashing a green light every fifteen seconds; and the Varne Lightship, far away in the south-west, a crimson flash. To these add the electric beam of the South Foreland lighthouse overhead, the distant radiance of Dover town; the similar every five seconds’ flash of Cape Gris Nez and the more frequent gleam of Calais Harbour, and you have an extraordinary galaxy, not easily to be matched elsewhere.