22 By Stream and Sea. 



Mistress Peggotty, who for her part was proud to call 

 herself a Yarmouth bloater, told little Copperfield that 

 Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the 

 universe. Copperfield had not till then held that opinion, 

 you may remember. Quoth he 



" It looked rather spongy and soppy, I thought, as I carried 

 my eye over the great dull waste that lay across the river ; 

 and I could not help wondering, if the world were really as 

 round as my geography-book said, how any part of it came 

 to be so flat. But I reflected that Yarmouth might be 

 situated at one of the poles, which would account for it. 

 As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent 

 prospect lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to 

 Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it ; and 

 also that if the land had been a little more separated from 

 the sea, and if the town and the tide had not been quite 

 so mixed up, like toast and water, it would have been 

 nicer." 



Approaching the town from inland, from the far-reaching 

 flats over which the North Sea is once supposed to have 

 freely ebbed and flowed, you must agree with the faithfulness 

 of Master Copperfield's portraiture ; but, seen from the 

 water, Yarmouth has a certain quaint picturesqueness of its 

 own, very pleasing to the eye that rests upon it when the 

 windmills on the low sandhills are revolving, when the 

 autumn sun smites the housetops with his ruddy hand, when 

 the pierheads are crowded with amateur codling-catchers 

 and spectators, who gather there at the rate of twelve human 

 beings for every fish hauled up, and when the heavy black 

 boats on the beach are busily performing their duties as 

 mediums between the fishing-vessels and the carts waiting to 

 bear away their produce. It is worth incurring the dis- 

 appointment of an unsuccessful two hours' fishing in an 



