Jim Davis | Page 2

figureheads, and the brass cannon at the ports, and to hear the men singing out aloft as they shifted spars and bent and unbent sails. They were all very lofty ships, built for speed; all were beautifully kept, like men-of-war, and all of them had their house-flags and red ensigns flying, so that in the sun they looked splendid. I shall never forget them.
After that, we went back to the inn, and climbed into another coach, and drove for a long, long time, often very slowly, till we reached a place near Newton Abbot, where there was a kind woman who put me to bed (I was too tired to notice more). Then, the next morning, I remember a strange man who was very cross at breakfast, so that the kind woman cried till my uncle sent me out of the room. It is funny how these things came back to me; it might have been only yesterday.
Late that afternoon we reached the south coast of Devon, so that we had the sea close beside us until the sun set. I heard the sea, as I thought, when we reached my uncle's house, at the end of the twilight; but they told me that it was a trout-stream, brawling over its boulders, and that the sea was a full mile away. My aunt helped to put me to bed, but I was too much excited to sleep well. I lay awake for a long, long time, listening to the noise of the brook, and to the wind among the trees outside, and to the cuckoo clock on the landing calling out the hours and half-hours. When I fell asleep I seemed to hear the sea and the crying out of the sailors. Voices seemed to be talking close beside me in the room; I seemed to hear all sorts of things, strange things, which afterwards really happened. There was a night-light burning on the wash-handstand. Whenever I woke up in the night the light would show me the shadow of the water jug upon the ceiling. It looked like an old, old man, with a humped back, walking the road, bowed over his cudgel.
I am not going to say very much about my life during the next few years. My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, and no great fondness for the children of others. Sometimes I was very lonely there; but after my tenth birthday I was at school most of my time, at Newton Abbot. I used to spend my Easter holidays (never more than a week) with the kind woman who put me to bed that night of my journey. My summer and winter holidays I spent with my uncle and aunt in their little house above the trout-stream.
The trout-stream rose about three miles from my uncle's house, in a boggy wood full of springs. It was a very rapid brook, nowhere more than three or four feet deep, and never more than twenty feet across, even near its mouth. Below my uncle's house it was full of little falls, with great mossy boulders which checked its flow, and pools where the bubbles spun. Further down, its course was gentler, for the last mile to the sea was a flat valley, with combes on each side covered with gorse and bramble. The sea had once come right up that valley to just below my uncle's house; but that was many years before--long before anybody could remember. Just after I went to live there, one of the farmers dug a drain, or "rhine," in the valley, to clear a boggy patch. He dug up the wreck of a large fishing-boat, with her anchor and a few rusty hoops lying beside her under the ooze about a foot below the surface. She must have sailed right up from the sea hundreds of years ago, before the brook's mouth got blocked with shingle (as I suppose it was) during some summer gale when the stream was nearly dry. Often, when I was a boy, I used to imagine the ships coming up from the sea, along that valley, firing their cannon. In the winter, when the snow melted, the valley would be flooded, till it looked just like a sea, and then I would imagine sea-fights there, with pirates in red caps boarding Spanish treasure galleons.
The seacoast is mostly very bold in that part of Devon. Even where there are no cliffs, the land rises steeply from the sea, in grassy hills, with boulders and broken rock, instead of a beach, below them. There are small sandy beaches wherever the brooks run into the sea. Everywhere else the shore is "steep-to"--so much so that in many places it is very difficult to reach the sea. I mention