of—­I quote the local guidebook—­“one of the most delightful resorts in the East Anglian poppy-land.”  Then more mean houses, the gaunt ungainliness of the electric force station—­it had a huge chimney, because no one understood how to make combustion of coal complete—­and then we were in the railway station, and barely three-quarters of a mile from the center of this haunt of health and pleasure.

I inspected the town thoroughly before I made my inquiries.  The road began badly with a row of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops, a public-house, and a cab-stand, but, after an interval of little red villas that were partly hidden amidst shrubbery gardens, broke into a confusedly bright but not unpleasing High Street, shuttered that afternoon and sabbatically still.  Somewhere in the background a church bell jangled, and children in bright, new-looking clothes were going to Sunday-school.  Thence through a square of stuccoed lodging-houses, that seemed a finer and cleaner version of my native square, I came to a garden of asphalt and euonymus—­the Sea Front.  I sat down on a cast-iron seat, and surveyed first of all the broad stretches of muddy, sandy beach, with its queer wheeled bathing machines, painted with the advertisements of somebody’s pills—­and then at the house fronts that stared out upon these visceral counsels.  Boarding-houses, private hotels, and lodging-houses in terraces clustered closely right and left of me, and then came to an end; in one direction scaffolding marked a building enterprise in progress, in the other, after a waste interval, rose a monstrous bulging red shape, a huge hotel, that dwarfed all other things.  Northward were low pale cliffs with white denticulations of tents, where the local volunteers, all under arms, lay encamped, and southward, a spreading waste of sandy dunes, with occasional bushes and clumps of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so.  A hard blue sky hung over all this prospect, the sunshine cast inky shadows, and eastward was a whitish sea.  It was Sunday, and the midday meal still held people indoors.

A queer world! thought I even then—­to you now it must seem impossibly queer,—­and after an interval I forced myself back to my own affair.

How was I to ask?  What was I to ask for?  I puzzled for a long time over that—­at first I was a little tired and indolent—­and then presently I had a flow of ideas.

My solution was fairly ingenious.  I invented the following story.  I happened to be taking a holiday in Shaphambury, and I was making use of the opportunity to seek the owner of a valuable feather boa, which had been left behind in the hotel of my uncle at Wyvern by a young lady, traveling with a young gentleman—­no doubt a youthful married couple.  They had reached Shaphambury somewhen on Thursday.  I went over the story many times, and gave my imaginary uncle and his hotel plausible names.  At any rate this yarn would serve as a complete justification for all the questions I might wish to ask.