RYE AND EASTBOURNE 111 



impressed by a feeling of knowing it already — 

 somewhere abroad. Accordingly you set to work 

 to explain away the absence of copperasy green 

 sheen from the tall buildings' roofs by light s 

 effect, and take as heard a cheerful carillonade, a 

 practically incessant discourse from the church 

 belfries on the hill. A market-place must be, you 

 know, nearabouts to the high-standing church 

 or churches, and ponderous dogs patiently waiting 

 their masters and mistresses' orders to tug big 

 loads over very cobbly cobbled stones, or rattle 

 off *' light " save for two or three hundredweight 

 of passengers. Probably hard by is a barracks 

 and small soldiers doing a power of nothing with 

 miHtary but dilatory precision. The embar- 

 rassingly polite inhabitants you can't see, for the 

 houses in between, make you pity a Royalty who 

 must acknowledge salutes each moment. Nippers 

 invisible to the naked eye ungifted with extra 

 double microscopes are, you dare swear, respon- 

 sible for much of the mild din, the noise-dust 

 raised by life's friction within the township's 

 walls, an olla podrida of sounds floating over the 

 flats like a busy coast city's roar to the shipping 

 far out at sea. Under the hillock's shadow are 

 lusthausen to which, mere toy locations just over 

 the canals from the burgh, citizens resort, cutting 

 themselves off in imagination from town ways 

 and responsibilities. The elders in and out of 

 the settlement are deliberate, the youngsters 

 nimble of foot and brisk of speech, fast in their 

 games, childishly good-natured, and sweetly, 

 sociably unselfish. You have seen the place, or 

 something own brother to it, by the score in the 

 Low Countries — the real thing. '* Set " with the 

 sheep on the flats, now in evidence, more cows. 



