I do not know that at any time Hastings is a very lively place.  The houses have acquired a habit of being vacant, and even the front, with its bath-chairs, its bandstands that are silent on Sundays, and its seats upon which one may not smoke, is more suggestive of Puritans and invalids¹ than of pleasure.  If Time should suddenly drop a week from the due order of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists with vacant faces of dead men.  But when in late March the day has squandered² its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted³ the shore, creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter with salt, a p. 85man might surely be forgiven if he cried aloud against the extreme cruelty of Nature, the timid injustice⁴ of man.

Being of Anglo-Saxon blood, I did not give definite expression to the melancholy⁵ which the quenched⁶ seascape had invoked⁷.  I contented⁸ myself with leaning on the rail, and sneering⁹ at the art of the cripple who had made mathematically exact scratchings of Windsor Castle and the Eddystone Lighthouse on the sand.  There was something almost humorously impertinent about that twisted figure with one foot bowing and hopping¹⁰ for pennies in front of a terrible back-cloth of dreamy grey.  How could a man forget the horrors of infinite space, and scratch nothings on the blank face of the earth for

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