CHAPTER I.

PINCHLER'S DOCKYARD.

 

"Fashion for the nonce surrenders Giddy Mayfair's faded splendours, And with all her sons and daughters Hastens to health-giving waters; Rests when curfew bells are ringing, Rises when the lark is singing, Plays lawn tennis, flirts and idles, Laying snares for future bridals; Thus forgetting pleasures evil, In return to life primeval."

 

It was Toby Clendon who named it "Pinchler's Dockyard "--Toby Clendon, young, handsome, and a trifle scampish, who wrote witty essays for The Satirist, slashing criticisms for The Bookworm, and dainty society verses for any journal which chose to pay for such poetical effusions. A very cruel remark to make about Mrs. Pinchler's respectable private hotel at Marsh-on-the-Sea; but then the truth is always cruel, and Mr. Clendon proved the truth of his statement in this wise--

"A dockyard is a place where broken-down ships are repaired. Man, by poetical license, is a ship on the ocean of life. Some broken-down human ships under stress of circumstance put in to Pinchler's private hotel for repair in the matter of bodily ailments. Pinchler's harbours these broken-down human ships, therefore Pinchler's is a human dockyard. Strike out the word human as redundant, and there you are, Pinchler's Dockyard."

A whimsical deduction, doubtless, yet by no means void of a certain amount of truthful humour, as the guests at Pinchler's private hotel were for the most part deficient as regards physical completeness. If the lungs were healthy the liver was out of order. Granted that the head was "all there," the legs were not, unless one leg counted as two. Splendid physique, but something wrong with the internal organs. Yes, certainly a good many human ships were undergoing repair under the calculating eye of Mrs. Pinchler; and as her establishment was not healthy enough for a hotel nor sickly enough for an hospital, Toby Clendon's intermediate term "dockyard" fitted it exactly; so Pinchler's Dockyard 

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