On the best of days Seatown was not beautiful. I have read in books
romantic descriptions of Glebeshire coves, Glebeshire towns with the
romantic Inn, the sanded floor, fishermen with gold rings in their ears
and strange oaths upon their lips. In one book I remember there was a fine
picture of such a place, with beautiful girls dancing and mysterious old
men telling mysterious tales about ghosts and goblins, and, of course,
somewhere in the distance some one was singing a chanty, and the moon was
rising, and there was a nice little piece of Glebeshire dialect thrown in.
All very pretty.... Seatown cannot claim such prettiness. Perhaps once
long ago, when there were only the Cathedral, the Castle, the Rock, and a
few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships
came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were
bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown,
in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad
living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets
were loafers and idlers and castaways.
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