Athelstan), became little better than a poor
fishing village, till Dr. Baillie, at the latter end
of last century, found out the advantage of its
warm equable air for his consumptive patients,
and so turned the famished little town into a
fashionable watering-place.

The Hastings fishermen, who, with their
families, number about three thousand persons,
have long borne a high reputation for
being excellent seamen; but at one time they
also possessed a character of a more questionable
sort. They were great smugglers, and
desperate fellows enough in an encounter
with the revenue cutters. In very early
times they seem to have been downright
pirates, sparing neither foreign nor English
vessels, and exciting such terror that, on entering
any port, it was usual for the authorities
there to hold up a hatchet, as a sign of hostility
—a custom which is said to be continued even
to this day in some of our western harbours.
Every now and then, a number of these marauders
were strung up, as an example to the rest; but
they were a reckless set of men, and went their
way all the same. At the present time they
are a peculiar race, with a physiognomy distinct
from that of their townfellows, attributable
partly to their often intermarrying among
themselves, partly to their having, of old, in
their wild raids on the French coast, chosen
wives among the women there. Many a pretty
bit of corsair romance, I doubt not, might have
been picked out of the family records of these
men, had any been kept; stories of love and
adventure, with the smack of the briny wind in
them, and the bloom of a certain chivalrous
tenderness suffusing the reckless savagery, as
good as ever were told of Barbary pirates or
South American buccaniers. It is curious to
find how the same families continue from generation
to generation in the same calling, as the
descendants of the exiled French Protestants
are still weaving with their old hand-looms in
the attics of Bethnal-green and Spitalfields.
When, in 1586, the government of Queen Elizabeth
were preparing to defend the country from
the anticipated descent of the Spaniards, a
return was sent in from Hastings of the ships
that could be supplied by that port, with the
names of their masters and of all the able-bodied
mariners under them; and this document (which
is preserved in the State Paper Office) contains
a great many names that exist to this hour
among the boatmen. Two of them I have myself
observed about the town over shop doors—
two patronymics remarkable for their jingling
oddity; to wit, Bossum and Cossum. And
this reminds me of a good story of the said
names told by Leigh Hunt in a letter to one of
his daughters, and published in the Correspondence
(1862). The writer, referring to a sojourn
at Hastings in his early life, says that "a
Mr. Bossum used to visit our landlord, or a
Mr. Cossum, I forget which, and there was a
shopkeeper at the entrance of the town, whose
name was the other of the two names, whichever
that was; and Hastings had then a vile high
pavement on one side of the street, very fit to
break people's necks; and you must know
there was a pianoforte in the house; and so I
used to thump the pianoforte to a threatening
air, and sing the following words, the absurdity
of which has made me remember them:

If the people of Hastings don't mend this vile
street,
I'll Bossum and Cossum, and kick all I meet.

There was another couplet; but, having more
sense in it I suppose, it has slipped my memory.
As I have already intimated, the " vile
street" is as "fit to break people's necks"
as ever; and Bossum and Cossum still hold
their own. May the bearers of those famous
names increase and multiply, and may the
shadows of their craft upon the waters never
be less!

I am told in the guide-books that Mr. Banks,
of Bleak House, Hastings, has made sundry
observations with reference to the atmospherical
influences of the town and neighbourhood, from
which it results that "the 'cloudy fine' days
number 46; the 'cloudy,' 52; the 'fine-rain,'
42; and the ' cloudy-rain,' 30.5; while the
'rainy' days only amount to nine in the year.
From this it is evident that the number of days
on which the invalid cannot get out on account
of the weather is very few; and those on which
he may enjoy the rays of the sun are 280. To
these must be added 52 which are dry though
overcast; hence there are 332 days on which a
person may enjoy a walk." I have no doubt
this calculation is perfectly correct; yet I cannot
help calling to mind a day which must have
been one of those exceptional nine— a day of
perpetual, of inveterate, rain— a day when the
air seemed made of rain, and the house fronts
were soaked and blotchy, and the very sea looked
wet with a wetness not its own. I had dropped
down on Hastings for a few hours, and, having
no lodgings to go to, and not a soul in the place
that I could call on, was obliged to divide my
time between a bar-parlour and forlorn perambulations
through the sloppy streets. I glanced
from time to time out of the said bar-parlour
windows, and tried to draw hopeful auguries
from the scud of the clouds; but it rained with a
gloomy pertinacity. I sallied forth, and looked at
the old churches and the old houses; and it rained.
I returned to shelter and to speculation on the
skyey portents; and it rained. I effected a
sortie towards the castle walls, and saw a high
hill, and a grim circumvallation on the top, and
a leaden sky on the top of that; and the rain.
Once more I beat back to quarters, and in savage
mood heaped sundry maledictions on all connected
with Hastings, from the time of William
the Conqueror downwards; with special and
intensified application to certain cooks and
waiters who had still further embittered my fate
by serving me with an execrable dinner. And
it rained. In short, it was just such a day as
that which Mr. Longfellow describes in some
dismal verses, when "it rained, and the wind
was never weary;" though I was very soon