Beyond Splash Point nobody who was anybody ever thought it decent to penetrate. The band-stand, the winter gardens, the brick walls were at the West-end, reaching out towards Beau-nez. And the Hohenzollern was not only inaccessible, it was self-contained and meant to be. It possessed its own fine band, its own smooth lawns, its own strip of fore-shore with bathing rafts moored off it and bathing tents on the beach, its own tiny jetty for pleasure boats. The hotel was German-owned and German-inspired; but it was not the centre of an extensive spy-system as certain of the patriots of East Sussex maintained. The men and women who launched it as a business proposition were not mad. They were just cosmopolitan financiers who knew a good deal about the human heart on its shady side, and proposed to make money out of their knowledge. In Beachbourne it was always spoken of as the German Hotel, and its character was well known and probably exaggerated. The town, called by spiteful rivals on the South Coast Churchy Beachbourne, by reason of the number and variety of its sacred edifices, was shocked and delighted. Started in the late nineties, the original title of the Hotel was of course the Empire; and its first chairman, Baron Blumenthal, a prominent member of the Primrose League. Then came the slump in British Imperialism after the Boer War. With the advent of a Radical Government it became correct for desperate patriots to affirm with immense emphasis in private, and with less emphasis on public platforms that they would sooner see the country governed by the German Emperor, who was at least a gentleman, than by Lloyd George--that little Welsh attorney. At the height of this patriotic rally the German Emperor came himself to England; and Beachbourne was thrilled to hear the great and good man was to stop at the Empire Hotel to be under Mr. Trupp. The Hotel incontinently changed its name to commemorate an event which in fact never took place. Shortly afterwards, however, a Balkan Tsar--also a Hohenzollern--happily did come, and was subjected by Mr. Trupp to the operation prepared for the head of his family. But if the Hotel changed its name, its reputation remained the same and even grew. In Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Buda-Pesth, men talked of it; and even in India native princes whispered _risqué_ stories about it to their Prime Ministers at the Council Table. Wherever men spoke of it, they mentioned with smiles its two characteristic traits--the Third Floor and the Head Porter. The Hohenzollern Hotel, indeed, had two sides, like many a better institution, and deliberately cultivated both. The Third Floor represented one; and Salvation Joe the other.