“Manners just a shade worse than mine, if anything!” Bluecaster went on nervously. “His penny a week seems to have gone shouting. Still, perhaps we’d better let him down gently, as he’s so worried in his mind. He’s nothing against the Let, of course, but he’s got his knife pretty deep into the poor old Lugg. I wonder what set him raising this view-hullo? It’s in repair, I suppose, and all that kind of thing?” “I had it overhauled at the end of the bad weather. It’s as good to-day as when my father built it.” “That’s over fifteen years ago, isn’t it? How the county hummed!--remember? The Let was a pretty piece of work, but the Lugg fetched ’em up all standing. And what a rattling time the old lord had, sitting round and watching while your father ran the thing! He was getting a bit over age for Newmarket and all that, and fighting the sea put him on finely for amusement. People howled, and said it was defying Nature, and so on. The papers kept an eye on it for years, didn’t they? Remember that rough winter, when a lot of them sent reporters down to be ready on the spot when the bank broke, and the old serpent simply laughed at them? Why, Lancaster’s Lugg made the family famous! We’ve never done anything startling on our own account--nothing publishable, anyhow. And now this outsider has the old tale by the ears once more. Give me the gist of what he writes, will you?” “He says--it opens well!--that nothing but the most inflated arrogance would ever have built the Lugg at all; that the land behind it is a death-trap, while the Pride is a sheer insult in the face of the Almighty. But that’s only the beginning. His main argument is that the forcing of the tide into a narrower channel is a distinct menace to the farms at the head of the bay. (Thweng’s one of them, of course.) He contends that each storm places them in imminent danger, and demands that we break the bank, sacrifice the new land, and give the flood room. (Just the original arguments dug up again.) Failing this, he promises us a tide held waiting in God’s Hand, which will arrange matters so effectually that not only the whole present world but all succeeding generations shall gnash their teeth at us and brand us with shame!” “It’s a bit rough, isn’t it?” Bluecaster put in ruefully. “Seems pretty intimate Up Above, doesn’t he? Of course, one isn’t such a Borgia as to want to risk anybody’s life or set death-traps, or anything such rotten bad form as that--I’d sooner let the sea suck up the whole blessed income and have done with it--but your father always said the new land would make money for us eventually, and the Lloyd-Georgian era is very expensive. Surely he’s rambling a bit, Lancaster?”