We had journeyed by easy stages from Liverpool through Carnarvon, Llanberis, Penygwyrd, Bettws-y-Coed, Beddgelert, and Tan-y-Bulch. Arriving finally at Dolgelly, we sent the coach back to Carnarvon and took the train to Ross,—the gate of the Wye,—from whence we were to go down the river in boats. As to that, everybody knows Symond’s Yat, Monmouth, Raglan Castle, Tintern Abbey, Chepstow; but at Bristol a brilliant idea took possession of Jack Copley’s mind. Long after we were in bed o’ nights the blessed man interviewed landlords and studied guidebooks that he might show us something beautiful next day, and above all, something out of the common route. Mrs. Jack didn’t like common routes; she wanted her appetite titillated with new scenes.
At breakfast we saw the red-covered Baedeker beside our host’s plate. This was his way of announcing that we were to “move on,” like poor Jo in “Bleak House.” He had already reached the marmalade stage, and while we discussed our bacon and eggs and reviled our coffee, he read us the following:—
“Clovelly lies in a narrow and richly-wooded combe descending abruptly to the sea.”—
“Any place that descends to the sea abruptly or otherwise has my approval in advance,” said Tommy.
“Be quiet, my boy.”—“It consists of one main street, or rather a main staircase, with a few houses climbing on each side of the combe so far as the narrow space allows. The houses, each standing on a higher or lower level than its neighbour, are all whitewashed, with gay green doors and lattices.”—
“Heavenly!” cried Mrs. Jack. “It sounds like an English Amalfi; let us take the first train.”
—“And the general effect is curiously foreign; the views from the quaint little pier and, better still, from the sea, with the pier in the foreground, are also very striking. The foundations of the cottages at the lower end of the village are hewn out of the living rock.”
“How does a living rock differ from other rocks—dead rocks?” Tommy asked facetiously. “I have always wanted to know; however, it sounds delightful, though I can’t remember anything about Clovelly.”
“Did you never read Dickens’s ‘Message from the Sea,’ Thomas?” asked Miss Van Tyck. Aunt Celia always knows the number of the unemployed in New York and Chicago, the date when North Carolina was admitted to the Union, why black sheep eat less than white ones, the height of the highest mountain and the length of the longest river in the world, when the first potato was dug from American soil, when the battle of Bull Run was fought, who invented the first fire-escape, how woman suffrage has worked in Colorado and California, the number of trees felled by Mr. Gladstone, the principle of the Westinghouse brake and the Jacquard loom, the difference between peritonitis and appendicitis, the date of the introduction of postal-cards and oleomargarine, the price of mileage on African railways, the influence of Christianity in the Windward Islands, who wrote “There’s Another, not a Sister,” “At Midnight in his Guarded Tent,” “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever,” and has taken in through the pores much other information likely to be of service on journeys where an encyclopædia is not available.
If she could deliver this information without gibes at other people’s ignorance she would, of course, be more agreeable; but it is only justice to say that a person is rarely instructive and agreeable at the same moment.