CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CLOVELLY
A big, high, lumbering coach with four horses was slowly carrying Mrs. Pitt and her young charges toward Clovelly,—that most famous of all English fishing-villages. Betty, having discovered a photograph of it some weeks before, had not ceased talking to the others of her great desire to see the place; and finally Mrs. Pitt postponed her plans for visiting other and more instructive towns, packed up the young people, and started for lovely Devonshire. “Well,” the kind lady had thought to herself, “perhaps it will be just as well for them to have a short holiday, and go to a pretty spot where they can simply amuse themselves, and not have to learn too much history. Bless their little hearts! They surely deserve it, for their brains have been kept quite busy all the spring,—and I believe I shall enjoy Clovelly once again, myself!”
Now that they were actually there, the realization was proving even more delightful than the anticipation. The weather was perfect, and to drive along the cliffs and moors, with a fresh, cool breeze blowing up from the blue water below, was wonderfully exhilarating. Their route led through a country where innumerable bright red poppies grow in the fields of grain, and where there are genuine “Devonshire lanes,” shut in by tall hedges and wild flowers. Sometimes they clattered through the narrow streets of a tiny village, while the coachman snapped his whip, and the postilion in his scarlet coat and brass buttons, sounded his bugle loudly. As they rolled by farmhouses, heads would appear curiously at the windows, while children ran out to watch that important event,—the passing of the daily coach. One rosy-cheeked girl in a blue pinafore tossed a bunch of yellow cowslips up into Mrs. Pitt’s lap, calling out, “Cowslips, lady; thank ye!” When a sixpence was thrown down to her, she smiled, courtesied primly, and then disappeared into the nearest cottage,—one of plaster and thatch, overgrown with roses.
However, the crowning joy of the day, even in the opinion of John, who was difficult to please, was the first glimpse of quaint little Clovelly itself. The coach set them down in the middle of a field; a few seafaring men stood about, there was a booth or two where old women sold fruit, a steep path was before them, but no town was anywhere in sight.
“Don’t let’s go down there,” John grumbled. “What’s the use? I’d much rather stay up on that front seat with the driver.”
Mrs. Pitt smiled knowingly, and still led the way on down the walk. The hedges on either side were so high and thick that they could not see beyond them, and the children were really speechless when the path suddenly came to an end, and the whole queer little street of Clovelly lay before them. For a second no word was spoken, then all burst out at once.
“Well, what do you think of that?” chuckled John. “Just look at the donkeys!”