Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/176

Rh asked, “Well, Todd, what do you think of the weather?” he was careful not to commit himself by rash prophecies, and would answer, “Well, I don’t know, sir ; it might be eggs, and it might be young ’uns.”

Though a drinker of beer, he did not believe in spirits, and likened a dram to “a flash of lightning in a gooseberry bush.” “There ain’t no good in it; it’s no sooner in yer than it’s out of yer!” Some years later Edwards took a house at Dunwich, which has suffered so much from the encroachments of the sea that very little of the town is left. The ruined church, that used to be a considerable distance inland, stands now on a beetling cliff, which is rapidly disappearing before the continued action of the waves. If I were asked to name the sleepiest and quietest place I have ever seen, it would be Dunwich. Sandwich, on the Kentish coast, where grass grows in the market-place, and dogs lie sleeping in the sun in the middle of the road, is liveliness itself compared with Dunwich. Occasionally one or two of the children and I would go and take tea with the Edwards’. Their house was only four miles distant from Southwold, and was thought by many to afford a pleasant walk over that space of shingle in the hot sun. Keene and a very old friend of his, H. Harral, the wood- engraver, were staying with the Edwards’. Keene