‘Jack,’ said his father, ‘go back to the rudder, for we must try and land soon. There is Branscombe now, young ladies.’
The children looked and saw that they were coming quite close to the land again. The rocks were no longer red in colour, as at Salcombe, but white, and very different in shape; and there was a wide valley between these rocks and hills, and a very few houses were in the valley, not far from the sea-shore.
‘What a large ship that is! Shall we go close to it?’ asked Alice.
‘Yes, quite close, miss; it is full of coals, and the people on board are putting the coals into sacks, and then they let down the sacks into those big boats.’
Their boat soon came quite near the large ship, which grandmamma told the children was called a collier, because it always carried coals from one place to another. The children looked hard at the ship, as they had never been so close to a ship before. Then they sailed past the collier, and soon came up to the big black boat, and saw that it was full of sacks of coals, and they soon passed that. Beatrice thought that the men who were rowing the boat looked very black and dirty.
‘The coals make the men black, Beatrice,’ aid Alice. ‘If we played with coals, our hands and our dresses would be quite black too.’
‘But do these men play with the coals?’ asked little Beatrice.
‘No; to be sure they do not. Did you not see how the men put the coals into the sacks, and how the dust flew about on the ship? That is enough to make anybody black and dirty.’
The boat now came nearer and nearer to the land, and the little girls looked eagerly, and asked how they should get on shore.
‘Quite easy, little miss,’ said Bartlett. ‘Now, please sit quite quiet, and we will run her on shore. But please, ma’am, will you sit in the middle of the boat?’ which grandmamma and Mary did immediately; and the two sailors let down the sails, and took the oars and rowed hard, and in a very few minutes the boat went on to the shore, the one end much higher than the other end. The men jumped on to the shore; and when the next wave came and lifted the boat, they pulled it by a rope, and brought it up much higher on the shore.