Jim Davis | Page 2

uncle called me away.
There were many ships there at the time, all a West Indian convoy, and
it was fine to see their great 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