BREYDON IN LEISURELY AUTUMN ^159 



royal breakfast do we afterwards enjoy. When the tide 

 makes a bit more we will shove off, and quant up the cross- 

 drain to Jary the watcher's boat. Perhaps he will be going 

 up the DuffelPs drain to the " Fleet " for a little eel-picking ; 

 if so, we will join him. 



A QUIET SUNDAY 



August 6th, 1905. The spell of a quiet Sabbath evening 

 is upon me. The faint clamour of the church bells to the 

 eastward has died away, and the evening service has begun. 

 The tide is out, and as I sit in the " well " of the old house- 

 boat Moorhen, a wide area of mudflats, bare of water save 

 in the shallowest of pools, in which the dunlins can run 

 thigh-deep, lies spread before me right away to the long 

 monotonous bank of houses that, broken here and there by 

 a steeple or a tall chimney, represents the town of Yar- 

 mouth, whose only appearance of life, although teeming 

 with people, is exhibited in the smoke of an ice-factory, and 

 the whiter output of a distant locomotive. The flats, richly 

 coloured with the varying greens and browns of the pros- 

 trate " wigeon-grass," the "raw" (Chcetomorpha linuni), and 

 the " cabbage " ( ULva lactucd), remind one somewhat of an 

 inundated hay-field. An hour hence distant lights will twinkle 

 in the gloaming, and the glare of a holiday resort will make 

 one thankful that there is one little isolated freehold con- 

 veniently far away from it, where restfulness and quietude 

 are assured where only the tremulous notes of the whimbrel 

 and the mellow cry of the curlew break the stillness. In 

 the middle distance runs a silvery liquid thread ; it is the 

 "channel," along which glide two or three white-sailed yachts, 

 and an occasional wherry, the skipper of the latter, in these 

 hard times, gladly enough throwing in a seventh day's 

 passage to make up for a poor six days' earnings. Such is 

 Breydon, a salt-water broad so often described, and yet always 

 so fascinating at least to me. . . . 



7 p.m. At this moment there are a few blotches of cloud 

 overhead, yellowing, reddening, purpling as they glide down- 

 ward to the eastern horizon ; and below the setting sun 

 stretch wave-like fringes of clouds, fantastically gilded and 



