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158 IN NORFOLK BY THE SEA 



westward now, and a hundred years ago the town, they 

 say, was nearly twice as big. But this merely means 

 that the population has fallen from four thousand 

 souls to little more than half that number, not that 

 the town is any smaller than it was. It covers the 

 same area ; only many of the houses are coming, as 

 many have come, down. And it is this growth of 

 open spaces that gives the town much of its peculiar 

 charm. For up and down the streets are high walls 

 pierced with doorways through which you glance in 

 passing, prepared to see the squalor of a court. But 

 instead of this the eye strikes in on gardens ablaze 

 with roses and honeysuckle, and touched with every 

 shade of green. So — and strangely for a society 

 centred on cockles and mussels — its kitchen middens 

 are kept out of sight. 



And these means to existence are always with it — 

 the mussels brought in and formed in beds, the 

 cockles picked up when any tide is low. For its 

 people are not ambitious ; they have come to realise 

 that happiness lies not in gain of hard-earned money, 

 but rather in ease and contemplation ; a philosophy 

 which they owe perhaps to the School Board. Even 

 as the old harbour-oracle, asked one day for his 

 opinion about education, with slow emphasis defined it 



