They did not
stand on the ground, but on stakes of wood and shafts of brick, six
feet or so above the ground's level, and were led up to by flights of
wooden steps that tried not to look like ladders. They displeased me
much. They had little railed platforms round them, and things hanging
out to dry on the railings; and their walls vied unneighbourly with
one another in lawless colour-schemes. One tenement was salmon-pink
with wide bands of scarlet, another sky-blue with a key-pattern in
orange, and so on around the whole little horrid array. And I deduced,
from certain upstanding stakes and shafts at the nearer end of the
crescent, that the horror was not complete yet. A suspicion dawned in
me, and became, while I gazed again at the crescent's facades, a
glaring certainty; in the light of which I saw that I had been wrong
about the old railway-car. Defunct, it was not to die. It was to have
a new function.
I had once heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into sea-
side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor protruded
in my memory. To-day, as an eye-witness of the accomplished fact, I
was impressed, sharply enough, and I went nearer to the crescent,
drawn by a sort of dreadful fascination. I found that the cottages all
had names. One cottage was Mermaid's Rock; another (which had
fluttering window-curtains of Stuart tartan), Spray o' the Sea;
another, The Nest; another, Brinynook; and yet another had been named,
with less fitness, but in an ampler and to me more interesting spirit,
Petworth.
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