and requested that the landlord would take me
to look at the apartment where I had slept. The
landlord did go up with me to the room; and,
when I saw it, the last lingering ideas about the
supernatural or the tricky, disappeared from my
mind. There were no pedestals in the room,
certainly no statues, and the whole apartment,
with its faded tester-bed, and its common-place
aspect — for it had shrunk from the proportions
of a baronial hall to those of a mere sleeping-
room— looked so unfit for an adventure of any
kind, that I laughed the inward laugh of Leather-
stockings, to think I had ever been romantic
about it. In this amused state of sensation I
again woke. A third time I slept. The old dream
was still dimly carried on, but, by the sole thread
of the idea of travelling. I was on a pleasant
tour; I was with the charming ladies; the
haunted inn was left far behind, only remembered
to be laughed at. Glimpses of many lands
greeted me agreeably, and at half-past seven, my
usual hour, I awoke with a feeling of mingled
amusement and comfort.

This dream, or rather series of dreams,
represents, I doubt not, the phases of sensation in
many a sleeping human being, who lives, as we
most of us live, rather too well, with a "rudis
indigestaque moles" passing slowly off from our
well-nourished stomachs at about four of the
clock in the morning. There is, first, horror,
then nightmare, then effort and exertion, which
overcome nightmare; then alleviation, relief, yet
still doubt, and what Wordsworth calls "some
perplexity;" but, with the dawn, and with the
passing of that worst of the small hours, when
men die most, and (as the poet says) "Heaven's
breath is coldest," comes true good sleep.

THE HAPPY FISHING-GROUNDS.

THERE has always been a charm to me about
the fisherman's trade; a picturesque aspect, not
only in those red-handed, heavy-booted, half-
sailor-like dwellers upon the stony coast, who go
slowly out in short, fat, bounding boats, to cast
their brown wiry nets into the sea, but a rude
poetry even about the sloppy fish-market of
Lower Thames-street, with the steep and narrow
City lanes that lead down to the loaded hoys, and
end in a tangled web of rigging, masts, and
cranes. Some portion of this bloom is thrown,
to my fancy, over the old salt, small-windowed,
yellow City oyster-shop; and it always seems to
me that I have only to listen against the wall of
such a place and hear the hissing of the sea, or
to take up the floor of the little dry, fishy
counting-house, and find the blue waves rolling
and beating at my feet. The solid surroundings
of such a storehouse melt silently away, and
shadowy ancient mariners pass in and out. The
din of the busy street is suddenly hushed, and
I hear nothing but the roaring of the wind.
The low black rafters, hung with striding forms
of bat-like fish, press down on me no more, and
nothing but the grey sky, or the blood-red
sunset, is over my head. I see the dwarfed
fishing village across the waves; the cobwebbed
lane of drying nets that winds down to the
sands; and the soddened lobster-catches
struggling between the sunken rocks. I hear the
mellow tolling of the church bells in the little
turret that peeps over the huts. I see even
further, to a small harbour on the Normandy coast,
where a high-capped fisherman's wife is helping
her sons and her husband as they drag out their
battered boat. She watches them leave the
shelter of the little breakwater and plunge into
the open sea; she looks anxiously at the black
mountain of cloud that stretches, like a
menacing angel, over the distant town; at the
blinding columns of sand that come whirling
along the old winding pier; and she drops in
silent prayer before a weather-beaten crucifix
that is raised upon a mound at the roadside.

With such day-dream visions as these, even in
an old City oyster-shop, it is not to be wondered
at that I have a passion, in all weathers, for
dropping quietly down to the coast, and burying
myself, for a time, in one of those hilly nooks, where
none but boatmen and fishermen can be born,
can live, and can die. The places that I love
most are those where the "season-visitor" is
almost, if not totally, unknown; where bathing-
machines have never yet penetrated; where the
stranger is truly a being of another world; and
where the inhabitants believe, with a proud and
simple faith, in the unequalled beauty and
importance of their little scaly town. Many such
places as these do I know, even within fifty
miles of the Royal Exchange; and Whitstable, in
Kent, the port of Canterbury, on the estuary of
the Thames, is one of my especial favourites.

Many important towns, in many parts of
England, exist upon one idea; and Whitstable,
though not very important, is amongst the
number. Its one idea is oysters. It is a town
that may be called small, that may be considered
well-to-do, that is thoroughly independent, and
that dabbles a little in coals, because it has got a
small muddy harbour and a single line of railway
through the woods to Canterbury, but its best
thoughts are devoted to oysters. Its aspect is not
sightly, if looked at with an eye that delights in
the stuccoed terraces and trim gravelled walks of
a regular watering-place; for the line of its flat
coast (which takes up one side of a bay formed
by the Swale, a branch of the Medway) is
occupied by squat wooden houses, made soot-black
with pitch, the dwellers in which are sturdy
freeholders, incorporated free-fishers, or oyster-
dredgers, joined together by the ties of a common
birthplace, by blood, by marriage, capital, and
trade. It has always been their pride, from time
out of mind, to live in these dwarfed huts on
this stony beach, watching the happy fishing-
grounds that lie under the brackish water in the
bay, where millions of oysters are always breeding
with marvellous fertility, and all for the
incorporated company's good. How can the free-
dredgers, and the whole town of Whitstable,
help thinking of oysters, when so many oysters
seem to be always thinking of them?

A primitive and curious joint-stock company
it is; a joint-stock company whose shares are