_Esto Perpetua_ is all we have to say.
"VISITORS' LIST.--Arrivals since our last. North Shingles Villa--Mrs.
Bygrave; Miss Bygrave."
THE FOURTH SCENE.
ALDBOROUGH, SUFFOLK.
CHAPTER I.
THE most striking spectacle presented to a stranger by the shores of
Suffolk is the extraordinary defenselessness of the land against the
encroachments of the sea.
At Aldborough, as elsewhere on this coast, local traditions are, for the
most part, traditions which have been literally drowned. The site of
the old town, once a populous and thriving port, has almost entirely
disappeared in the sea. The German Ocean has swallowed up streets,
market-places, jetties, and public walks; and the merciless waters,
consummating their work of devastation, closed, no longer than eighty
years since, over the salt-master's cottage at Aldborough, now famous in
memory only as the birthplace of the poet CRABBE.
Thrust back year after year by the advancing waves, the inhabitants have
receded, in the present century, to the last morsel of land which is
firm enough to be built on--a strip of ground hemmed in between a marsh
on one side and the sea on the other.
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