light. Another was that the girls had evidently accepted their defeat in the last contest as final, and she should be rid of them for ever. She had noticed various preparations for departure, had seen heavy boxes lumbering the passages near their rooms, but had carefully avoided making any inquiries, and had begged her husband to do likewise.
"They will go," she said, "and it will be for the best. Either they or I must have gone, and I suppose you would prefer it should be they. It is their duty to say where they purpose going, and what they purpose doing. It will be time enough for you to refuse your consent, if the place of selection be an objectionable one, when they tell us where it is."
Two days after that conversation Mr. and Mrs. Creswell were sitting together after luncheon, when Maud entered the room. She took no notice of Marian, said to her uncle, "Gertrude and I are going away to-morrow, uncle, for some time, if not for ever. You won't be astonished to hear it, I know, but it is our duty to tell you."
"Well, Maud, I—going away—I confess, not entirely news to me"—said Mr. Creswell, hopelessly feeble—"where are you going, child?"
"We have accepted an invitation we have received, uncle!"
"An invitation? I did not know you knew any one, Maud! From some of your old school companions?"
"No, uncle: from Lady Caroline Mansergh—a friend of Mr. Benthall's and Mr. Joyce's, uncle!"
Marian looked up, and the light of triumph faded out of her eyes. It was but an incomplete victory, after all!
As the Crow Flies.
Due East.Harwich to Ipswich.
The sea gives and takes all along our coast. The history of its greedy and ceaseless annexations in our island would be geologically curious and valuable. Slowly the ocean is sucking our island away, as a boy sucks a sugarplum. Harwich presents several curious instances of this. Beacon Cliff, on the south of the town, is an eminence of clay separating Orwell Haven from Walton Bay. It once had a signal-house and telegraph on its summit, and it now boasts the largest martello tower in England, mounting ten guns. With the clay stone of this hill, that hardens with exposure, Harwich is paved, and the stout walls of Orford and Framlingham Castles were long ago built. It is a clay full of fossils, bivalves, shells, and elephants' teeth. Captain Washington, says Mr. Walcott, has measured the speed of the sea's progress at Harwich. The cliff lost ten feet between 1709 and 1756, eighty feet between 1756 and 1804, and three hundred and fifty feet between the latter date and 1841. The vicar's field has been swallowed up since 1807, and part of a battery, built in 1805, at a considerable distance from the sea, was swept away in 1829, and the ruins now overhang the shore. The sea, if not built out, will make a breach in time, the best authorities think, at Lower Dovercourt, turn the peninsula into an island, and destroy well-intentioned but somewhat somnolent Harwich. Felixstow shows other dangers awaiting Harwich. Felixstow has one charming feature—a straggling place several miles long, it has no shops, and sends for everything to Walton, a village two miles distant. In spite of a salt marsh, unsavoury at night, it is not an ugly place, for the cliffs are full of springs. There was once a castle behind the church, and a Roman fort, said still to exist, somewhere out at sea; and altogether, when it is once built, it really will be a town, and Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, who was easily pleased, has sung of it:
On that shore where the waters of Orwell and Deben
Join the dark heaving ocean, that spot may be found—
A scene which recals the lost beauties of Eden,
And which Fancy might hail as her own fairy ground.
Such are the delusions of local attachment. At Felixstow Point, where the cliff, from reddish yellow darkens to brown and yellow, striped black like the carcase of a mammoth tiger, the sea has been at it again. Waggon-loads of coprolites have been scratched and washed out of the cliff, and day by day, with this dangerous diminution, has grown a still more fatal gift, for the sea, changing from shallow green to grey, shows where a tongue of shingle has grown southward from Landguard Fort. This sou'-west drift of shingly sand, centuries ago, filled up the northern one of the two useful entrances to Harwich Haven, and joined this fort, originally on an island (vide old engravings), to the mainland. In 1804 this fatal "blue tongue of shingle" was five hundred feet long, and at its outer edge seven fathoms deep. Ine cement works dug out huge slices of fossil earth from Felixstow for "cement stone." Certain blind, selfish seekers for money removed a useful ledge of coprolite that had hitherto barred the drift at Felixstow Point. The burrowing at Beacon Cliff, on which stands Harwich Lighthouse, hastened the evil. The invisible, ceaseless workers for mischief went on. In 1841 the Demon's tongue had grown eighteen hundred feet long, and in 1859 nearly three thousand (no operation could remove it now), and, moreover, its base had reduced the practicable channel to eleven feet. Then the sleepers at last awoke. Harwich harbour spoiled, there would be no place of refuge on the east coast from the Thames to the Humber; and civilisation having had no effect as yet in emolliating the manners of the North Sea, this was important. The Admiralty had long talked
