[Illustration:  “Please, de tings!”]

At the Hotel.—­Find, on getting out of the omnibus, that the Hotel is being painted; entrance blocked by ladders and pails.  Squeeze past, and am received in the hall by the Proprietress and a German Waiter.  “Certainly they can give me a room—­my baggage shall be taken up immed—­” Here I have to explain that this is impracticable, as my baggage has unfortunately been left behind.  Think I see a change in their manner at this.  A stranger who comes abroad with nothing but a stick and an umbrella cannot expect to inspire confidence, I suppose.  I remark to the Waiter that the luggage is sure to follow me by the next boat, but it strikes even myself that I do not bring this out with quite a sincere ring.  Not at all the manner of a man who possesses a real portmanteau.  I order dinner—­the kind of dinner, I feel, that a man who did not intend to pay for it would order.  I detect this impression in the Waiter’s eye.  If he dared, I know he would suggest tea and a boiled egg as more seemly under the circumstances.

On the Digue.—­Thought, it being holiday time, that there would be more gaiety; but Ostend just now perhaps a little lacking in liveliness—­hotels, villas, and even the Kursaal all closely boarded up with lead-coloured shutters.  Only other person on Promenade a fisher-boy scrooping over the tiles in sabots.  I come to a glazed shelter, and find the seats choked with drifting sand, and protected with barbed wire.  This depresses me.  I did not want to sit down—­but the barbed wire does seem needlessly unkind.  Walk along the sand-dunes; must pass the time somehow till dinner, and the arrival of my luggage.  Wonder whether it really was labelled “Ostend.”  Suppose the porter thought I said “Rochester” ... in that case—­I will not worry about it like this.  I will go back and see the town.

I have; it is like a good many other foreign towns.  I am melancholy.  I can’t dismiss that miserable luggage from my mind.  To be alone in a foreign land, without so much as a clean sock, is a distressing position for a sensitive person.  If I could only succeed in seeing a humorous element in it, it would be something—­but I can’t.  It is too forlorn to be at all funny.  And there is still an hour and a half to get through before dinner!

I have dined—­in a small room, with a stove, a carved buffet, and a portrait of the King of the BELGIANS; but my spirits are still low.  German Waiter dubious about me; reserving his opinion for the present.  He comes in with a touch of new deference in his manner.  “Please, a man from de shdation for you.”  I go out—­to find the sympathetic Porter.  My baggage has arrived?  It has; it is at the Douane, waiting for me.  I am saved!  I tell the Waiter, without elation, but with what, I trust, is a calm dignity—­the dignity of a man who has been misunderstood, but would scorn to resent it.