Whiffs of the Sea

1

In front of the thatched summer-house on a lawn over-looking rockery and water garden at Telbury Grange sat Rupert Madgeby and the two old college friends whom he had invited for the weekend. Of these, Richard Penham was a don at Oxbridge and Derek Singleton a literary and art critic on the staff of the Evening Review. Madgeby himself after being called to the Bar had come in for money on the death of an uncle in the steel trade, and now seasoned his limitless leisure with honorary secretarial work for a number of philanthropic causes. None of the three men was much over thirty, Singleton being the eldest at thirty-three and a half.

'It's the jasmine at the back of the summer-house,' Madgeby was saying; 'I've never known it so sweet as this year. It is a strange thing that so little trouble has been taken by horticulturists to develop or even to preserve the scent of flowers. I hear that, after sacrificing the scent of sweet peas to magnifications of size and accentuations of colour, they have been driven to the absurdity of introducing a special class at flower-shows for sweet Sweet Peas! Nor is it always the fault of the florist. Musk in recent years appears to have deodorised itself of its own initiative. No musk smells nowadays.'

At this point Penham interpolated the suggestion that gardeners and garden owners did not as a general rule care about the smell of flowers; otherwise the seedsman would cater for them quickly enough. There was, he said, no literature of scent as there was of colour and sound. Smell was the Cinderella of the senses.

'It isn't correct,' Singleton complained, 'to represent that there is no literature of scent. Oddly enough, I happen to be compiling an anthology on this very subject, and my citations are already so voluminous as to need pruning. Surely, Penham, you can't have forgotten that lovely passage in Bacon's essay, "Of Gardens"? I can quote you the first sentence: "And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air."

'Then there is that delightful bit about flower scents in A Hind in Richmond Park. I can't repeat the words from memory but Hudson's argument was that the odour of blossoms, although charged with memories, never lost the freshness and charm of novelty.'

'You wouldn't, I suppose, suggest,' Madgeby enquired, 'that memories ever created a scent?'

'No; but Alphonse Karr came very near to such a proposition in his Tour of my Garden. His statement was so unusual that it has stuck in my mind; this is what he wrote:

'"There often exhales from certain flowers something more and even better than perfume—I mean certain circumstances of life with which they are associated and with which they inseparably dwell in the mind, or rather in the heart, even as the hamadryads were not able to quit their oaks."'

'Is your anthology limited to what has been written about the scent of flowers?'

'Oh, no! The longest section will in fact be about smells of the sea. There's some very fine poetry, and prose too, about them.'

'Ugh!'

The exclamation seemed to have been jerked from Madgeby's mouth involuntarily, but he temporarily avoided interrogation by addressing the butler who had just arrived with the tea things.

'Parkins, when you fetch the hot toast will you be so good as to bring me the red notebook lying on top of the small bookcase in the morning-room? The red one, remember; there are several of them there but only one is red.'

'Very good, sir.'

'You were about to ask me, I think'—Madgeby turned-to his two friends—'why I said "Ugh!": so I've told Parkins to bring you the explanation. I never like being called a liar to my face though I've no objection to people disbelieving me behind my back. That's why I've written down a short account of an experience the actuality of which I can't very well expect anyone else to accept. To put it crudely, I was once haunted by a smell and the memory is not so pleasant as to make me want to talk about it. So you two can read my notes after tea, while I walk down to Merriman's to remind him about Mrs Gibson's geranium cuttings. Thank you, Parkins: yes, that's the right one. Sugar, Dick? Nor you either? What commendably economical guests!'

As soon as tea was finished and Madgeby had disappeared down the shrubbery path, Penham took up the notebook and, at a nod from Singleton, began to read aloud.

2

[from the Red Notebook: First Part]

I bought the water-colour drawing at Herbertson's in Redford Row for two guineas. It was the picture of some harbour or estuary; sea lavender, shingle, samphire and mud in the foreground; two rowing boats moored to a buoy in the middle distance, and a third boat with two oarsmen approaching from a ketch in midstream; beyond the channel a line of more mud, fields and hedges; and above them, between two clumps of elms, a distant spire; more distant still a glimpse of wooded downs. I had never heard the name of the artist (the picture was signed 'C. Withentake, 1841'), nor had old Herbertson. He had thought the drawing and colouring good, as did I, and had bought it on its own merits at a sale for two pounds. He had subsequently developed a dislike for it and would let me have it for that sum. 'Nonsense,' I replied, 'you would die of remorse when you tot up your accounts! I'll give you three guineas for it. In my opinion it's good.'

I was confirmed in this opinion when I saw the picture hanging in my rooms at Stanners Court, and Hollingdon, who dropped in for tea, congratulated me on the buy. 'It's got quite as much atmosphere in it,' he said, 'in spite of its accuracy of detail, as any of our modern impressionist stuff. The scene is almost unpleasantly alive.'

I am never a sound sleeper and in the early hours of next morning I went into my sitting-room for a book. The moment I opened the door my breath was caught by a strong, very strong, smell of the sea; not merely a fishy, shrimpy, muddy, weedy or salty smell, all of which odours can be sensed in isolation, but that unmistakable concentrated amalgam of them all that one inhales on the shore at low tide. I do not like this smell at any time, and always avoid a seaside holiday. I thought little of it now, however, as the window was open and I postulated a high tide in the Thames and a wind from the south-east. It struck me as strange to read in the newspaper next morning that tides were neap and the wind in the north, but I dismissed the matter from my mind as negligible, and would have forgotten all about it but for a repetition of the smell that very next night and during many succeeding nights. A professional writer might finds words adequately to describe the cumulative nastiness of these experiences. I will only say that I loathed the smell more and more and began to dread its recurrence. I understood now the full significance of the common phrase which predicates of a hateful thing that it stinks in one's nostrils. This filthy sea smell stayed and stank in mine.

I disliked it none the less for a nightmare that would often synchronise with it. In this dream I would find myself cabined in a very small metal compartment and seem to hear all around me the swishing and gurgling of water. A complete airlessness foreboded early suffocation. In a frenzy of despair I would try to beat my hands against the sides of my prison, only to find that they as well as my legs were securely tied with ropes. At this point, with a horrid jump of the heart, I would wake up in a cold sweat, and with the smell of the sea pungently around me.

I was beginning to mistrust my sanity, or at any rate, my ability to retain it, when my trouble was brought into perspective with the humdrum and commonplace by Mrs Durren. This lady is employed by Stanners Court Flats Limited under the impressive designation of Lady Supervisor of the Company's Residential Premises; but to all of us tenants she has always been just 'Mrs D'.

'Ferguson has been telling me of the smell that hangs about your sitting-room when he takes the coals up of a morning.'

'So he's noticed it too?'

'Yes, and I went this morning to see, or perhaps I should say, to smell, for myself. Mr Madgeby, there must be seaweed in the back of that new picture. That's where the smell comes from. Please have it opened up and the stuff taken out. My husband used to keep seaweed nailed onto a board and called it his barometer. He was seldom far out in his forecasts either, but I couldn't a-bear the smell it gave off, and this one's exactly the same.'

'But nobody would place seaweed behind a painting!'

'And why not? Quite likely it was the artist's keepsake from the beach where he drawed it. Anyway, there's no mistaking the smell, and if the seaweed isn't there we shall have to look somewhere else. But my nose, which is a sharp one, has traced it to that picture!'

3

[from the Red Notebook: Second Part]

As I anticipated, Mrs Durren was proved wrong. There was no seaweed nor anything else found at the back of the picture. Its unframing, however, disclosed some faint writing on the reverse of the drawing, which had been imperfectly erased and could without great difficulty be read as follows:

Who toils for us is our toilerman
And his lad our toiler boy;
If he boil not who is boilerman
Hie to our boiler boy:
So, hey, sing hey, for our boilerman
And hey for the boiler boy.
These lines struck me not merely as meaningless but as positively idiotic but, such is the perversity of the human brain, I could not get them out of my head.

At the time of which I am writing the comic operetta, Sailors Seven, was having its record run at the Golconda, and every guttersnipe in town was whistling the tune of that song which begins:

The bosun yelled at the cabin boy; Young son of a dog, roared be.
To this wretched tune the words on the back of the picture attached themselves in my involuntary imagination: it was a maddening combination! Nevertheless, it had an interesting development.

I was in the library of my club, where I thought myself alone, when, stepping down from a ladder with a book on Tudor Monuments in my left hand, I sang to myself softly and absentmindedly, to the comic opera tune, the words:

So hey, sing hey, for our boilerman
And hey for the boiler boy!
'Good heavens! who's that?'

Dropping the book in my surprise and turning round, I saw Aubrey Lenville staring at me from the writing-desk in the alcove.

'I'm sorry, Madgeby, to have startled you,' he said, 'but you gave me such a shock. Where on earth did you pick up that song you were singing; I mean the words?'

When I told him that I had found them at the back of a painting he grew more excited than ever.

'Do you know what they mean?'

'Certainly not,' I replied. 'They can't mean anything! The whole verse runs like this' (I repeated all six lines) 'and it's obviously tosh.'

'It may seem so to you, Madgeby, but by Jove I'm glad to have overheard you! There's history in it.'

'History in what?'

'In that verse! Let's get into these comfortable chairs and I'll explain. That's better. I wonder if you've yet seen any books in that "Sidelines of History" series that Goldenshaw's are publishing?'

'No; but I've read the Decade's review of the one on Lepers and Lunatics. It sounded interesting and I jotted it down on my library list.'

'Well, I've been commissioned to write the volume on Smugglers, and that's how I'm able to place your song and give it a meaning. It's part of an old smugglers' shanty, and I'll tell you all about it so far as my researches have gone so far.'

Lenville walked over to the desk where he had been writing, and came back with a large number of notes written on blue foolscap. After a minute or two's search he found the sheet he wanted.

'Here we are. This is my note, and I'll read it as it isn't too long: "In Thornychurch harbour the smugglers for some undiscovered reason called their leader 'the boiler-man' and the following verse is still known at Itchenham as the Smugglers' song:

Who coils our rope is coilerman
And his son our coiler boy;
If he boil who is our boilerman,
Beware his boiler boy:
Once ho! twice ho! for our boilerman;
Thrice ho! for our boiler boy.
'(A different version from yours, Madgeby, or maybe a second verse to it?) "Most of the gang lived on the Itchenham side but tradition has it that they landed their stuff across the water at Bosnor, where the Emstead and Thornychurch channels meet. A spit of shingle near their junction is still known as Boilerman's Hard. The trade appears to have prospered well into the Queen's reign when the leader, one Charles Wapentake—"'

Withentake, not Wapentake,' I found myself interrupting. 'What on earth—'

'Never mind, go on reading. I'll explain afterwards.'

'"One Charles Wapentake, agreed with the Customs House man at Itchenham to betray the whole business for a consideration but, before the bargain could be kept, Wapentake disappeared entirely from the vicinity, nor was he ever heard of again either there or anywhere else. The rest of the gang are believed to have transferred their activities to Graylingsea, where in the face of increased wariness on the part of the Customs the trade soon petered out. It became known after his mysterious disappearance that Wapentake had entered into an agreement with the Dean of Thornychurch to make certain drawings of the cathedral before commencement of its restoration." That finishes my note. It's only half the story of course, but it gives the meaning of the lines you were singing. I don't suppose that I shall ever succeed in finding out anything more about the Bosnor gang; I pumped my local sources dry.'

'You've certainly provided a context for my song, but hardly a meaning! Now, if you can find time to come round with me to my rooms in Stanners Court I would like to show you the picture on which the verse was scribbled. The painter signed himself as C. Withentake: that's why I interrupted you just now.

'You can come? Well, that's splendid. Let's be getting along.'

Twenty minutes later we both stood opposite the picture in my room. A twitching of Lenville's facial muscles belied the apparently calm deliberation with which he proceeded to examine it through my magnifying glass.

'You're right about the name; it's certainly Withentake, and the drawing is just as certainly a view of Thornychurch harbour. There's no mistaking Thornychurch spire. It must, I think, have been sketched from Bosnor beach. What, by the way, is that thing which the boats are moored to?'

'Isn't it a buoy?'

'Perhaps so; but it's such a strange shape, more cylindrical than conical.'

'Yes,' I politely agreed, 'more like a boiler than a buoy.'

Lenville suddenly gripped my arm, so violently that it hurt.

'You've got it, Madgeby; you've got it, by Jove.'

'Got what?'

'Why, the boiler buoy, of course! Sing, hey, for the boiler boy! It's all as clear as a pikestaff. This was the smuggler's buoy, and the receiver who kept rendezvous by it and landed their smugglings they must have called their boiler-man. The fire which he lit on the shore would be a signal of safety only if it were without a cauldron or kettle; or, in the words of your song, if he boiled not who was boilerman. Nor were signals given at Bosnor only. There's other stuff very typical of known smugglers' codes in the rest of the verse. A man and a boy at work in the fields by Dittering Gap or coiling, ropes on Bulver Quay, would have indicated some item of intelligence. There may, too, have been some significance in the number of Heys! or Ho's! to be shouted. One can't hope to establish the exact details now, of course; but, thanks to you, Madgeby, the main puzzle is solved.'

'Possibly,' I replied. 'But I'm now going to tell you something which has been worrying me and which, I fear, will prove unexplainable.'

Lenville listened critically but not incredulously to my narration of the recurrent smell and nightmare. He felt sure, he said, that both must bear some relation to the picture, and thereupon fell silent and pensive over a whisky-and-soda which I had poured out for him.

'What are you doing next weekend?' he at length enquired.

'Nothing particular; why?'

'Because I want you to run down with me to Thornychurch on Friday evening, and we can get back on Monday morning. That will give us two whole days to have a look round Bosnor. The farmhouse there has been derelict for a long time and there's nobody living on the headland, but I can get two men to row us over from Itchenham and lend a hand.'

'Lend a hand at what?'

'Investigation.'

'But what do you expect to find there?'

'What you've been dreaming about: a narrow metal chamber, airless and dark, surrounded by a gurgling and swishing of water. In other words, the boiler buoy. There's no port authority in Thornychurch, and where the buoy once floated there it must have since sunk. You can still see the one that used to mark the Stocker Shoal if you look over a boat's edge there at low water in spring tides. If we should succeed in fording it, it might be possible to have it opened. From the words of those two verses I guess that the inside may well have been used as the Smugglers' cache. Anyhow, the clue's worth following up. Will you come?'

I promised to do so.

'By the way,' Lenville concluded, 'we shall need to have this picture with us in order to get our bearings. So take it out of its frame, will you, and pack it at the bottom of your suitcase where it won't get crumpled.'

4

[from the Red Notebook: Third Part]

When we landed in our boat from Itchenham on the spit of muddy shingle off Bosnor known as Boilerman's Hard the tide was still on the ebb and there was an hour or so to go before low water. Lenville walked straight up the pebbly strip towards the foreshore, carrying in his hand the portfolio in which I had placed the Withentake picture. On reaching the line of sea lavender and dried seaweed that marked the season's high water-mark he took the drawing out and compared it with the actual scene before him. A puzzled look quickly crept into his face. In the picture Thornychurch spire was exactly over the water end of the hard, where the boats lay moored to the buoy. Our own boat, now occupying an identical position, was completely out of line with the spire! Lenville was explaining this discrepancy to me when one of our boatmen came up: a man named Burdenshaw, who, having served as a yacht-hand in his younger days, now made a comfortable living by looking after many of the small craft at Itchenham, which their owners found time to sail only at weekends.

'It's plain to me, sir,' he politely struck in, 'that this here droring were done afore the Yardle creek came to be shifted after the storm of seventy-two, when the spring tides spilled over Tilsea Bank and flooded all the Brinsley flats. The old sluice, way back there where you see them gulls, were washed away when the water as had got in had to make its way out again at change of tide; and the creek as it now lays follows the straight cut as was then made. The water cut through the old hard, it did; and that's the old hard all right what we sees in that picture.'

'But you told me over at Itchenham,' Lenville objected, 'that this was Boilerman's Hard.'

'Well, sir, so it be and so it bean't. After the Bosnor levels were reclaimed (and a mort of money was lost when the sea broke in again) farmer Betterman started grazing his cattle off them, and it were he as made the present hard with shingle from Haylesworth bar. Betterman's Hard it should rightly be called, but the name of the old got stuck onto the new and Boilerman's Hard is what it is called by.'

'So that's how it is!' Lenville said with a recovered cheerfulness. 'Well, now we've got to find the end of the old hard, and it shouldn't be difficult. You two must now go back to the boat, while I walk along the shore till I get Thornychurch spire exactly half-way between those two clumps of elms, as it is in the picture. Then I want you to row slowly along at the edge of the muds till I give you a shout. That shout will mean that you've reached a spot on the direct line between me and the spire, and that's where you'll want those poles we've brought. Just go on prodding the bottom till you hit on something hard; then stake it with a pole and shout for me. While you're prodding don't forget to keep an eye on me, or you'll soon drift off the line. As long as I keep my arms down you can take it that you're all right, but if I hold out either arm you must pole the boat towards that side until I drop it again. Is that quite clear?'

It was; so Burdenshaw and I rejoined the other man in the boat and, as soon as Lenville shouted, commenced our prodding. We had prodded for a long half-hour and the stench of the mud, which reminded me unpleasantly of the smell in my nightmare, had begun to make me feel sick when Burdenshaw asked what it might be as the other gentleman expected for to find?'

'An old buoy, I believe.'

'Then it ain't no good us prodding here in the water for what's been high and dry five miles away for more nor thirty year! The old buoy be up at Appleham under the sea wall; as I would have told the other gentleman if he had asked after it: but he never did, did he, Bill?'

'He sure didn't.'

I bade them row to the new hard and had soon explained the position to Lenville, who bitterly cursed old Dingleby, the landlord of the Crown and Sceptre at Itchenham, for not having told him all he might have done. We must now, he added, go straight to Appleham.

This as it happened was easy enough, for the wind was blowing strongly up the harbour from the south-west, and under a small lugsail we were soon running before it at a good speed and, on passing Itchenham, saw that the yachts at their moorings were already swinging to the flood tide. This was also in our favour for, by the time we had reached Never Point, we found sufficient water for us to row right up the channel to Birdquay, whence a walk of little more than ten minutes brought us to Appleham sea wall.

When I caught sight of the object of our search I felt sure that the boatmen must adjudge us lunatics. In this, however I was wrong, for I soon realised that their sense of local importance vested everything in Thornychurch harbour, or near it, with an interest that needed no explanation, much less apology. The object might once have been an actual boiler: if so, the inspection plate had been removed many years ago, and I found what might perhaps be the remains of it quite near by. The resultant hole in the cylinder, into which the plate would once have fitted, had been worn and widened by corrosion and rust into a large and irregular aperture. Inside there lay a drift of sand, dried sea-weed, crab-shells and other wind-borne rubbish; for the boiler lay above the level of ordinary tides. With the help of a spade, Lenville satisfied himself that it contained nought else, and we then started on a long and laborious row back to Itchenham against both wind and tide. Having at length arrived there, I noticed that Lenville paid both boatmen much more than the amount agreed upon, presumably by way of compensation for the bad temper which he had exhibited on the way back.

After a polite 'thank you!' the younger of the two (Bill, whose surname I never got) mumbled something about old Dingleby's father having been sexton up at Appleham before they built the new church, and about an uncle having kept the 'Crab and Lobster' at Birdquay. With this parting intimation the two made off and, turning to Lenville, I suggested that we might turn into the 'Crown and Sceptre' for some food and drink as well as for a questioning of old Dingleby.

'If he knows more than he's already told me, he's a damned old scoundrel,' Lenville assented, 'but we'll make sure.'

5

[from the Red Notebook: Fourth Part and Postscript]

'We didn't never expect to see you back here so soon, Mr Lenville,' Old Dingleby remarked, as he set before us the beer, bread and cheese which we had ordered, 'for there hasn't been none of your history-making here since you went away, and you sucked us as dry as an orange, you did, over them smuggler stories.'

'I'm not too sure about that,' rejoined Lenville, 'though you swore that you'd told all you know about the Bosnor gang.'

'Aye, sure!'

'But you said nothing at all about the buoy which lies under Appleham sea wall, did you?'

'Ah! then I didn't tell you about that, didn't I? Well now, if that isn't strange! But some days I remember and some days I forget, though most days and most ways I mind well what were told me by my father. He never told me nothing that weren't worth minding, didn't my father.'

'And what did he tell you about that buoy?'

'That it were broke away from its mooring off Bosnor in the big tides before Jubilee and were drifted up under Appleham wall, where it now lays.'

'Anything else?'

'Nothing, except that it were opened up by Squire Marcroft and Parson Hayden and nothing found but mud and bones.'

'What did they expect to find?'

'Something maybe as might be more comfortably stowed in their own insides! It were a smugglers' buoy, you mind.'

'Ah, yes; I see: and what then?'

'Well, my father said as the Chief Constable come down one day out of Thornychurch; and bodies be one thing, he says to the Squire, and bones be another. What is took out as bones may have been put in as bones, he says; and them as finds can lose. So Squire Marcroft was for chucking them into the creek; but Parson said as they must be given benefit of the doubt, and buried them as you come to the old churchyard stile; and if ever they belonged to a Christian body, he said, they could climb over easy at the doom.'

At this point, Lenville called for two more mugs of beer and some more cheese.

'I wish, Landlord, you'd told me all this before. It would have saved my friend and me a long journey and a wasted morning. I suppose that your father never told you of any suspicion he may have had about those bones?'

'Not exactly suspicions, but he and my uncle, as had the "Crab and Lobster", this side of Birdquay, used to argue as how they might have belonged to Smuggler Withentake. It's in the Dean's books that Withentake took an order to make drawings of the cathedral, and afore he could do that he must need get out of his old trade. But, asks my uncle, would his mates over at Bosnor make him free? No, answers my father; that they wouldn't: for why, he knew their secrets. Therefore, my father and uncle agreed, he must have gone to the Customs and offered to do what would at the same time rid him of his bad company and fetch him money for his paints and what not. Then, hearing as he were about to play Judas on them, his mates would have set on him and shut his body, alive or dead, into the old buoy. That was what my father would say, and my uncle too; and my father used to add that it were his honest hope as they killed their man first, for to be shut up in that boiler without light or drink or food, and to hear the water gurgling and licking the outside—'

'That's enough!' I interrupted, and hurried outside, leaving Lenville to explain that I was of a somewhat nervous disposition and to settle the account. Lenville, very considerately, talked of other subjects all the way back to London; but as we parted at the railway terminus and were shaking hands, he smilingly, instead of 'Goodbye', said 'Q.E.D.'

R. MADGEBY
17th September, 1899

Postcript.—Since writing the above notes, I have not once been incommoded by the smell or by the nightmare therein described. Mrs Durren, to her great satisfaction, traced the former to the use of seaweed in his bath by the tenant of the rooms immediately below mine. He had it sent up twice a week by rail from the south coast and found that it relieved his rheumatism.

R.M. 13.XII.99

6

Penham and Singleton were still discussing scents and dreams—both generally and with particular reference to what they had just read in the notebook—when they saw their host returning by the grass path between the herbaceous borders and carrying under his arm a picture-frame.

'I thought,' Madgeby explained, 'that you might like to see the actual painting about which I wrote in those notes. I keep it locked up in a cupboard nowadays, because of its associations; although, here at Telbury, we're seventy miles from the coast and unlikely to catch any whiffs from the sea! I think that you'll agree as to its being a good piece of work.'

After a careful and critical examination, for which purpose Madgeby propped the frame against the back of a garden seat, both guests assented, Singleton enthusiastically. All three men thereafter reclined once more in the comfortable deck-chairs and lazily accepted the drinks and smokes which Parkins brought round on a tray. The evening was warm and windless and conducive to reverie rather than to argument. The night-scented stocks in the bed round the summerhouse began to add their fragrance to that of the jasmine—a blend which would have been sickly but for the admixture of tobacco smoke. Suddenly however the closeness of the atmosphere seemed to be lifted, and a rustle in the silver poplar on the lawn was followed by a whispering in the maple above the summer-house. A number of yellowish leaves fell fluttering down and, so nearly inaudible as to be felt rather than heard, came the rumble of distant thunder. The three friends raised their eyes simultaneously to the sky overhead, which, however, gave no hint of rain or storm. Something nevertheless began to impinge on a sense other than those of sight and hearing. Faint, but definite and unmistakable, and as though it came from an infinite distance, there was wafted into their nostrils the smell of the sea. Penham and Singleton glanced at each other as if for mutual verification, then at the picture on the seat, and, lastly, at their host.

For a few moments, Madgeby continued to sip his whisky-and-soda in silence. Then, setting down the glass carefully on a stool by his side, he turned to his friends with a smile of enquiry. 'I wonder,' he said, 'whether either of you have ever had personal experience of auto-suggestion?'

Clarke,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
http://ricksbbs.synchro.net:8080