I cannot hope to communicate to you the peculiar pleasure we took in this, nor to give you an idea of the frantic haste with which we grubbed up more turf and piled on more boulders. We achieved an extraordinary enthusiasm in doing these things.
But time wore on: the Wreck was bending over our joint architecture, putting (I think) an ornamental cornice on it by way of finishing touch, when he fell off with a great splash and a shower of stones into about three and a half feet of water, and lay grovelling there, full length, while the dam burst apart like the opening of folding-doors, and left him, in quicker time than I can write it, stranded, but—no!—not dry.
Rarely have I laughed so long and so helplessly.
We reached Looe toward tea-time, as the melodious crash and tinkle of tea “things” from the open doors of outlying cottages informed us.
Looe lay below us, precipitous, lovely, in a golden haze. Looe was welcome, for the rocky walking of the afternoon had developed blisters. Below, directly in our path, lay an inn with a sign bespeaking “warmest welcome,” to quote from Shenstone. It was the “Salutation.” But the reception, though polite enough, belied the sign. The “missis” was out, said the landlord; he could not get us tea.
Then we had to seek elsewhere, finally to find tea and a haven for the night at the “Ship.”
LIII.
Looe is a little place, yet it hums with life quite as loudly, in proportion, as any hive. Carts, all innocent of springs, rattle thunderously up and down its steep and narrow streets and lanes; the voices of them that cry pilchards are heard continually; the noise of the quays and the roar of the waves, the chiming of the Guildhall clock, and the blundering of sea-boots upon cobble-stones, help to swell the noise of as noisy a town for its size as you shall find. There is always, too, the shouting and yeo-ho-ing of the seamen in the harbour, and the tinkle of windlasses echoes all day across Looe River, mingled with the screaming of the sea-gulls in the bay.
As Looe River runs toward the sea, the valley narrows until, in its last hundred yards, it becomes a narrow gorge, with rugged rocks and precipitous hills on either side, and as you stand facing the sea, but a few yards from the diminutive beach, you are in receipt of an effect theatrical in its romantic exaggeration, and instantly your mind is filled with vague visions of the highly coloured nautical scenes long peculiar to the Transpontine Drama, now sacred to the memory of G. P. R. James and T. P. Cooke. The proper complement of this stage-like piece of foreshore would be, you feel certain, a row of footlights, and the eye wanders right and left for the wings, whence should come the virtuous sailor, the Dick Dauntless of the piece, with his Union Jack, pigtail, quid, and hornpipe, all complete; with straw hat, blue jacket, brass-buttoned, and trousers of spotless white; his whiskers curled in ringlets, and his mouth full of plug tobacco and sentiments of the most courageous virtue. He should come on, furiously hitching his slacks as he rolls, rather than walks, upon the boards, waving his Union Jack and brandishing a cutlass—though, how he is to do all this at once with only two hands is more than I can tell you.