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I slept, and I woke, and I lay awake for hours. Every vext problem of my life and of the hereafter presented itself to me, and had to be argued out and puzzled over with maddening reiteration. The reason for this was evident and flagrant. It had woven itself into the tissue of my brief unconsciousness, and was now recognised as, ineradicably, part of myself.

The tide was incoming, that was all, and the waves currycombed the beach with a swishing monotony that would have dehumanized an ostler.

This rings like the undue inflation of a little theme. I ask no pity for it, nor do I make apology for my weakness. Men there may be, no doubt, to whom the unceasing recurrent thump and scream of a coasting tide on shingle speaks, even in sleep, of the bountiful rhythm of Nature. I am not one of them–at least, since I visited King’s Cobb. The noise of the waters got into my brain and stayed there. It turned everything else out–sleep, thought, faith, hope, and charity. From that first awakening my skull was a mere globe of stagnant fluid, for any disease germs that listed to propagate in.

Perhaps I was too near the coast-line. The highest appreciations of Nature’s thunderous forces are conceived, I believe, in the muffled seclusion of the study. I had heard of still-rooms. I did not quite know what they were; but they seemed to me an indispensable part of seaside lodgings, and for the rest of that night I ardently and almost tearfully longed to be in one.

I came down in the morning jaded and utterly unrefreshed. It was patent that I was in no state to so much as outline the preliminaries of my great undertaking. “Use shall accustom me,” I groaned. “I shall scarcely notice it to-night.”

And it was at this point that Miss Whiffle walked like a banshee into the disturbed chambers of my life, and completed my demoralization.

I must premise that I am an exquisitively nervous man–one who would accept almost ridiculous impositions if the alternative were a “scene.” Strangers, I fancy, are quick to detect the signs of this weakness in me; but none before had ever ventured to take such outrageous advantage of it as did Miss Whiffle, with the completest success.

This lady had secured me for a month. My rights extended over the lantern-windowed sitting-room and the bedroom above it. They were to include, moreover, board of a select quality.

“Select” represented Miss Whiffle’s brazen mean of morality; and, indeed, it is an elastic and accommodating word. One, for instance, may select an aged gander for its wisdom, knowing that the youthful gosling is proverbially “green.” Miss Whiffle selected the aged gander for me, and I gnawed its sinewy limbs without a protest. On a similar principle she appeared to ransack the town shops for prehistoric joints (the locality was rich in fossils), and vegetables that, like eggs, only grew harder the more they were boiled.

I submitted, of course; and should have done no less by a landlady not so obstreperously constituted. But this terrible person gauged and took me in hand from the very morning following my arrival.

She came to receive my orders after breakfast (tepid chicory and an omelette like a fragment of scorched blanket) with her head wrapped up in a towel. Thus habited she had the effrontery to trust the meal had been to my liking. I gave myself away at once by weakly answering, “Oh, certainly!”

“As to dinner, sir,” she said faintly, “it is agreed, no kitching fire in the hevening. That is understood.”

I said, “Oh, certainly!” again.

“What I should recommend,” she said–and she winced obtrusively at every sixth word–“is an ‘arty meal at one, and a light supper at height.”

“That will suit me admirably,” I said.

She tapped her fingers together indulgently.

“So I thought,” she murmured. “Now, what do you fancy, sir?”

“Dear me!” I exclaimed, for her face was horribly contorted. “Are you in pain?”