114 WAYFARING NOTIONS 



are moved to kinder quarters when wintry rigours 

 arrive. The human dwellers on the low lands 

 can't send their lambs to the hills and downs, and 

 he who walks and sees with understanding eyes 

 needs only a little looking at the youngsters* 

 complexions to tell what the cold wet marshes 

 and the white mists do for this sort of youngsters. 

 Pleasant places the Rye men's lines are laid in 

 while fine weather lasts, pleasant enough to make 

 me often wish for much racing at Folkestone, 

 making excuse to drop over (by convenient 

 trains, you know) to the colony on the cape 

 point of a long promontory shelving on the edge 

 of the Rother's course. A regatta was on as I 

 arrived, the riverside *'buntinged" up to the 

 eyes, and the main street full of committee-men — 

 so I made for the marshes and the golf-links at 

 Camber, where the process of vegetable colonisa- 

 tion I alluded to from Selsey gallops, absolutely 

 gallops. There can you see shingle turned into 

 pasture almost while you wait, and the yellow- 

 horned poppies grow and the bugloss and the 

 thrift and the nightshade feeding on air and 

 carpeting the loose pebble beach with a network 

 of vegetation, mostly "annuals," shortly to be 

 starved out by the hardly perennial usurper turf, 

 that turn reclaimed waste into pasture before 

 Neptune knows he is in the hands of the land- 

 grabbers. 



Why the deuce could I not begin by con- 

 verting the South- Eastern so as to get a time- 

 table all for my own purposes.-^ If I had I 

 would not have come away hungering with 

 gnawing desire to see Dungeness as the 

 Micawbers saw the Medway. *' Over there," 

 said an enthusiastic native gentleman of Kent, 



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