One couple had gone to London; the other had gone to the Bungalow village at Bone Cliff.  Where, I wondered, was Bone Cliff?

I came upon my wooden-legged man at the top of his steps.

“Hullo,” said I.

He pointed seaward with his pipe, his silver ring shone in the sky light.

“Rum,” he said.

“What is?” I asked.

“Search-lights!  Smoke!  Ships going north!  If it wasn’t for this blasted Milky Way gone green up there, we might see.”

He was too intent to heed my questions for a time.  Then he vouchsafed over his shoulder—­

“Know Bungalow village?—­rather.  Artis’ and such.  Nice goings on!  Mixed bathing—­something scandalous.  Yes.”

“But where is it?” I said, suddenly exasperated.

“There!” he said.  “What’s that flicker?  A gunflash—­or I’m a lost soul!”

“You’d hear,” I said, “long before it was near enough to see a flash.”

He didn’t answer.  Only by making it clear I would distract him until he told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his absorbed contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and the shine.  Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him.  Then he turned upon me cursing.

“Seven miles,” he said, “along this road.  And now go to ’ell with yer!”

I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted, and I set off towards the bungalow village.

I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the end of the parade, and verified the wooden-legged man’s directions.

“It’s a lonely road, you know,” he called after me. . . .

I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track.  I left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out into the dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a traveler who nears his end.

The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing fatigue.  The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint sigh and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that never completely died out again.  The way was sometimes sandy, thick with silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with lumps that had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes in thickets, sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent hummocks of sand.  At one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep looming up among the gray.  After a time black pinewoods intervened, and made sustained darknesses along the road, woods that frayed out at the edges to weirdly warped and stunted trees.  Then isolated pine witches would appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as I passed.  Grotesquely incongruous amidst these forms, I presently came on estate boards, appealing, “Houses can be built to suit purchaser,” to the silence, to the shadows, and the glare.