“I mean,” said he, “supposing we have no fixed abode, but go from place to place as it suits us?”
What boy would not have jumped at the suggestion? I was in ecstasies.
“You see,” said Uncle Jenico, “moving about, I get ideas; and in ideas lies our future prosperity. Let’s look at the map.”
It was a lovely proposal. To enter, in actual being, the mysterious regions of pictures-on-the-wall; to breathe the real atmosphere, so long felt in romance, of tinted lithographs and coloured prints; to find roads and commons and phantom distances, wistful, unattainable dreams hitherto, made suddenly accessible to me—it was thrilling, it was rapturous. My uncle humoured the thought so completely as to leave to me the fanciful choice of our first resting-place.
“Only don’t let it be too far,” he said. “Just at present we must go moderate, and until I can realise on the sale of a little patent, which I am on the point of parting with for an inadequate though considerable sum.”
I spent a delightful hour in poring over the county map. It was patched with verdant places—big farms and gentlemen’s estates—and reminded me somehow of those French green-frilled sugarplums which crunch liqueur and are shaped like little vegetables. One could feel the cosy shelter of the woods, marked in groves of things that looked like tiny cabbages, and gaze down in imagination from the hills meandering like furry caterpillars with a miniature windmill here and there to turn them from their course. The yellow roads were rich in suggestion of tootling coaches, and milestones, and inns revealing themselves round corners, with troughs in front and sign-boards, and perhaps a great elm shadowed with caves of leafiness at unattainable heights. But the red spit of railway which came up from the bottom of the picture as far as Colchester, and was thence extended, in a dotted line only, to Ipswich, gave me a thrill of memory half sad and half beautiful. For it was by that wonderful crimson track that my father and I had travelled our last road together as far as the old Essex town, where, since it ended there for the time being, we had taken coach for Suffolk.
“Made up your mind?” asked Uncle Jenico, by-and-by, with a chuckle.
I flushed and wriggled, and came out with it.
“Can’t we—mayn’t we go to the sea? I’ve never been there yet; and we’re so close; and papa promised.”
“The sea?” he echoed. “Why, to be sure. I’ve long had an idea that seaweed might be used for water-proofing. It’s an inspiration, Richard. We’ll beat Mr. Macintosh on his own ground. But whereabouts to the sea, now?”