A Message From the Sea | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
Stories" edition by David Price, email [email protected]

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA




CHAPTER I
--THE VILLAGE

"And a mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the
days of my life!" said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it.
Captain Jorgan had to look high to look at it, for the village was built
sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was no road in it,
there was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level yard in it.
From the sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular rows of white houses,
placed opposite to one another, and twisting here and there, and there
and here, rose, like the sides of a long succession of stages of crooked
ladders, and you climbed up the village or climbed down the village by
the staves between, some six feet wide or so, and made of sharp
irregular stones. The old pack- saddle, long laid aside in most parts of
England as one of the appendages of its infancy, flourished here intact.
Strings of pack- horses and pack-donkeys toiled slowly up the staves of
the ladders, bearing fish, and coal, and such other cargo as was
unshipping at the pier from the dancing fleet of village boats, and from
two or three little coasting traders. As the beasts of burden ascended
laden, or descended light, they got so lost at intervals in the floating
clouds of village smoke, that they seemed to dive down some of the
village chimneys, and come to the surface again far off, high above
others. No two houses in the village were alike, in chimney, size, shape,
door, window, gable, roof-tree, anything. The sides of the ladders were

musical with water, running clear and bright. The staves were musical
with the clattering feet of the pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the
voices of the fishermen urging them up, mingled with the voices of the
fishermen's wives and their many children. The pier was musical with
the wash of the sea, the creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the
airy fluttering of little vanes and sails. The rough, sea-bleached
boulders of which the pier was made, and the whiter boulders of the
shore, were brown with drying nets. The red-brown cliffs, richly
wooded to their extremest verge, had their softened and beautiful forms
reflected in the bluest water, under the clear North Devonshire sky of a
November day without a cloud. The village itself was so steeped in
autumnal foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost
round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a
bird's- nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And
mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too;
for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his
flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was
hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater,
fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.
Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself on
the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do when
they are pleased--and as he always