Love and Liking

Excerpt from Love and Liking: A Novel It had been called into existence by the railway, which brought it into direct communication with London; but Sandycot was three hundred miles from the metropolis, a fact which kept it select in the excursion train and tourist season, and enforced exceptionally moderate rents during the winter. A long imposing pier shot out into what was popularly termed the harbour, but no sea-going craft ever cast anchor in its shallow waters, which at the ebb of tide receded to the extent of fully a mile. But when the tide flowed high, pleasure boats came and went, and small trawlers to supply the piscatory needs of the inhabitants.
Little more than a generation ago Sandycot had been the merest fiction of a village, a little unknown hamlet, with but one small church of no particular period or architecture, of no genteel traditions, and with only headstones and rough-hewn slabs, with here and there a death's-head and crossbones for monumental sculpture.