But passengers were few and far between this time of year and of day.

The "season"-- as was the new-fangled fashion to call it--being now over; trippers tripped home again to wheresoever their natural habitat might be.

The activities of boys' schools, picnic parties, ambulant scientific societies and field-clubs--out in pursuit of weeds, of stone-cracking, and the desecration of those old heathen burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being.
Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox.
Not that he, Jennifer, as he explained, owned to any quarrel with the alien invasion.

Good for trade they were, that tripper lot, though wonnerful simple, he must say, when they came to talk, blessed with an almighty wide swallow for any long-eared fairy tale you liked to put on them.

Mortal full of senseless questions, too, fit to make anybody laugh!--Whereat overcome by joyous memories of human folly, he opened the red cavern of his apparently toothless mouth, barking up audible mirth, brief and husky, from the depth of a beer-slaked throat.
He leaned forward while speaking, resting chest and elbows on the oars--only now and again dipping the blades in the water to steady the boat in its course as it moved smoothly onward borne by brimming stream and tide.