In those days before railways, sea-borne goods came cheapest to Cromer, on whose sands the cargo-boats of small burden were beached and unloaded between tides. The few houses for the accommodation of summer visitors had not overshadowed the fisher-village, and the narrow streets remained paved, as from time immemorial they had been, with cobble-stones. The great people, locally, of that period were the allied families of Gurneys, Buxtons, and Hoares, of whom the few petty shopkeepers stood so greatly in awe that no visitors could count upon being able to purchase anything until those tradesfolk had made quite certain those grand seigneurs were not likely to require the articles in demand. The railway, which altered all this, was long kept away by the exclusives, but it came at last, and, backed by the sentimental gush of Mr. Clement Scott’s writings on what he was pleased to call “Poppyland,” spoiled Cromer. The public read the articles on “Poppyland,” and fell all over the place. There are those—and among them the present writer—who are sick of the name of “Poppyland,” and for whom Overstrand is spoiled by that much-quoted poem, the “Garden of Sleep,” on which the Great Eastern Railway guide-book writers, and the manufacturers of pictorial post-cards have traded, in and out of season. [Illustration: CROMER.] The evolution of Cromer from fisher-village to fashionable resort was well on the way in 1892, when Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1841 was born at the early nineteenth century mansion called Cromer Hall, took the title of Cromer on his being created a Viscount; and the process was completed in the summer of 1901, when the pleasure Pier, constructed at a cost of £43,000, was opened. It replaced the wooden Jetty built at a cost of £6,000, after the storm of 1845, and battered to pieces in 1897. The new Pier, ornamental, and rather alien in appearance, is evidence of Cromer’s determination to be select and to stand aloof from popular vulgarities. Here those who seek the automatic machine shall not find, and no stalls, and no advertisements are permitted. At Cromer, in fact, the higher vulgarity is cultivated, just as at Yarmouth you plumb the depths of the lower variety. The tripper, holiday-making at Yarmouth, who comes over to see what Cromer is like, and finds no whelk and oyster stalls, and no popular entertainments on the sands, thinks it dull; and the average man, wandering along the Lighthouse cliffs in danger of having an eye knocked out by the wealthy and selfish vulgarians who practise golf there, is prone to consider Cromer a fine place, except for the people who frequent it, and for whose benefit the giant hotels facing the sea have been built, and still are building.