THE upstart capital of these levels is Burnham, but the supremacy is disputed by Highbridge. Now Burnham and Highbridge, although but a mile and a half apart, are places very different, socially and geographically. The first stands amid sands, by the seashore; the other is situated about the distance of a mile from the sea, on the muddy, sludgy banks of the river Brue. Burnham is a pleasure resort, of sorts, to which all the railways of Somerset and Dorset run frequent cheap excursions. It is the ideal of the average Sunday School manager, seeking a suitable place for the school’s annual treat; for here you have sands—a little muddy perhaps, but eminently safe. It would be possible to get drowned only after superhuman exertions in finding a sufficient depth of water; unless indeed one wandered off in the direction of the Brue estuary in one direction or the lonely shores of Berrow in the other; where it is easily possible to be drowned in the swiftest and most effectual manner; as demonstrated every summer by a few rash and unfortunate bathers, who generally prove, strange to say, to be local folk, presumably well informed of the risks they run—and foolishly contemptuous of them. Highbridge is not a pleasure resort. Not even a Sunday School manager would fall into that error. It was once (but a time long enough ago) a place inoffensive enough; a hamlet of no particular character, good or ill, beside the river Brue, and taking its name from the original humpbacked bridge that here spanned the stream; built in that manner for the purpose of allowing masted barges and other craft to pass under. That was Highbridge. Nowadays, the old bridge is replaced by a modern flat iron affair, and there are railway sidings and docks, and great sluice-gates to the river Brue. Here, too, are the engine shops and works of the Somerset and Dorset Railway, with a large and offensive, and exceptionally blackguardly, colony of railway men, Radicals and Socialists to a man, and not content with holding their own views, but insistent upon imposing them upon their neighbours at election-times, with threats and violence. There are railwaymen _and_ railwaymen, but the country in general has, as yet, little comprehension of their essentially disaffected, selfish, and dangerous character, as a body: the more dangerous in that they have largely in their power the communications of the land. We shall hear more of them some day not far distant, and governments will be obliged to give them a sharp lesson in social discipline. But enough of Highbridge and its forlorn, abject houses, and its paltry modern church with red and black tiled spire, apparently designed by some infantile architect. Let us return to Burnham, and contemplate the crowded promenade there.