T WHAT CAME OFF' AT CODLINGHAM REGATTA. I would be hard to find a plea- Indeed, if a good light soil and santer place to spend an idle hour on a midsummer afternoon than the slope of one of the cluster of low sandhills which end off the strip of barren land separating the channel of Rakeston harbour from the open sea. By the time that you have passed the pilot-house on the beach, and skated for two or three miles across the slippery mud flats, with an August sun overhead, you feel that you can lay your gun down among the bent, and throw yourself on your back with a clear conscience, and look straight up through your hands at the little troubled tern as they skim backwards and forwards above you. The very sea seems to go to sleep. It is deep water, quite up to the shingle bank; but the lazy rollers run too gently on the beach to break noisily. The colours, like everything else, are subdued. The sky is paler and has more rose madder mixed with its blue than it has elsewhere, and the sea is hardly a different shade of the same tint: scarcely darker than the backs of the kittewakes which float on it; or the long line of shingle which stretches away towards the three wooded hills and the purple cliffs of Codlingham, six miles away to the right. The dry bent grass which covers the hills forms a colour link between the pale yellow sand which half buries it everywhere, and the sky above. Rakeston itself can be seen a mile and a half off, with its double-towered church on the slopes above the town. A flag flies from the tallest tower at high tide when there is water enough for the little coasting vessels which can come up to take the bar; and the Thames at London Bridge does not look half so imposing as the channel at such times, though at low water there is no difficulty in wading across it a quarter of a mile above the sea. The whole air of the land above the town is remarkable, and in many respects not unlike some of the vineyards in the valley of the Rhone. extremes of are, as they say, the chief requisites for grape growing, the experiment might, I have often thought, be worth trying there. The strawberries grown there are celebrated, and so seductive, that it generally becomes a serious thing to have to run a sixer in the second innings of a cricket match at Rakeston when the British Queens are on. But when a long spell of hard weather has frozen up the ditches and ponds, inland, and driven the wild fowl in from the open sea; when the channel is half choked with floating blocks of ice, and the fields of saltwort and sea lavender above high-water mark are snowed over, and the cutting wind across the marsh through which the last mile of the road runs, gets at your marrow, through three flannel shirts and any number of great coats and rugs, then is the time to see Rakeston to perfection. The soft flats, as the tide leaves them, are alive with fowlers and whistling birds of twenty sorts. Immense flocks of knots and sandpipers wheel about in front, like dark clouds one moment, almost dazzling the next, as their white breasts and bellies flash into sight; and geese and ducks keep passing up in long lines, or toss about out of shot in the black water. Some years ago, Captain Henry Rowland, a smart young officer, and capital company, came down to Codlingham to take command of the coastguard. He had chosen the station himself as a good shelf for a year or two after his marriage; and as smuggling was still not quite extinct thereabouts, expected to find enough work to keep himself going, and showed every intention not to let the men under him go to One sleep if he could help it. frosty morning in October, not very long after his arrival, he and I went over together to Rakeston; and, leaving orders for Old Jockey West to be sent to meet us with his |