Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody
battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside
other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent
straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow
to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among
weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness,
featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed the outward
expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to come from
London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich to distract the
naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating brine to the
determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an appetite that
rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite of certain frank
whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the common to mingle
with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and gentleman entering
the town to take lodgings for a month, and that on the morrow they took a
boat from the shore, saying in their faint English to a sailor veteran of
the coastguard, whom they had consulted about the weather, "It is better
zis zan zat," as they shrugged between rough sea and corpselike land.
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