But we are a long time getting to our inn; and when we do at last arrive it is only to find that every room is occupied. Until yesterday they were without visitors, but a recent influx of two ladies has been sufficient to fill all their available space! So we are fain to seek elsewhere.
And it requires some search, for the flower-season is not the best time for getting rooms on the off-islands. Space, as well as time, is much occupied with the flowers; and sometimes every downstairs room is stocked with pots and basins, jars and bottles, full of daffodils and narcissi, while the ordinary furniture is pushed just anywhere to get it out of the way.
We are beginning to lose hope. Every one is very kind, but “no space,” “no time,” or “no food” is always the difficulty. (Provisions, as a rule, are obtained weekly from Penzance.)
Must we retrace our steps to the little post-office, and ignominiously wire to the launch to come and fetch us and our baggage back again to St. Mary’s? But no; at last, in a little four-roomed thatched cottage at the farthest extremity from the beginning of our search, we find a refuge.
We are now on the east side of Tresco, on the shores of “Old Grimsby,” which is almost opposite the harbour of New Grimsby on the west side. From the windows of the little cottage there is a lovely view across the bay. On the headland which shuts it in on the south there are the ruins of an old fortress, called by Troutbeck “The Block-house”; in the distance is St. Martin’s Isle, with other smaller islets—mere barren rocks—dotting the intervening sea. I know not when the view is lovelier—when the fortress stands out dark against a rosy dawn, or when it glows red in the shafts of the setting sun.
All round this part of Tresco, on the waste lands, and at the edges of the sea, grow great bushes of the tree-mallow, or lavatera arborea, covered in summer with purple and mauve blossoms. (Is it as bad to talk of a “mauve mallow” as of a “pink pink” or a “violet violet”?)
When the seed-vessels are formed the rats will run up the woody stems, and eat the green “cheeses,” as we used to call them as children. It is a pity all their tastes are not as innocent, for they are a menace to the young chickens, besides stealing eggs and robbing potato-sacks when they can. But I do not think there are any rats nowadays so voracious as those that Leland describes on Rat Island—rats that would think nothing of eating a live horse!
Here also are fringes of tamarisk, and other low trees, along the shore. St. Martin’s men come over in boats and cut off the branches for making crab and lobster-pots—“trimming our trees for us,” as the Tresconians put it.
Of course every cottager has his patch of flowers. One may see the cut blossoms, in pots and bottles, set outside the cottage doors, or in the windows, to open in the sunshine, before being sent to “England.”