‘Sailing boats and rowing boats,’ said he.
‘I shall often want to go out sailing,’ said I. ‘What is more heavenly than sailing?’
‘You will have to go alone so far as I am concerned, Agnes,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, but John will often accompany me,’ said I.
‘Not very often,’ he exclaimed. ‘Had I been a lover of sailing I should have gone to sea, instead of which I am a solicitor, and I spell sails with an “e” and not with an “i.” Well, is it settled?’ he continued, drawing a pipe case from his pocket and extracting the pipe from it. ‘I believe there will be time for half a pipe of tobacco before we go to church.’
But the nurse being out I could not go to church, and my sister would not leave me alone with the children, and my husband, instead of filling half a pipe filled a whole one, and took no heed of the church bells when their happy peaceful chimes floated through the open window. Indeed it was not settled; the subject was too interesting to be swiftly dismissed, yet my husband had his way in the end, as usually happened, for before evening service was over we had arranged to spend a month at the little town whose praises he had sung so poetically.
Next day he made a journey to the shores of the Bristol Channel to seek for lodgings. But the accommodation he required was not to be found in apartments, and when he returned he told me that he had taken a house standing near the edge of the cliff in a garden of its own. A few days later our little family proceeded to the sea coast. We left two servants behind us to look after the house, and the only domestic we took with us was the nurse, a person of about my own age, who had been with me at this time about six weeks, having replaced an excellent, trustworthy young woman who had left me to get married.
I will call the little place from which dates the story of my terrific experiences, Piertown.
What with having to change here, and to get out there, and to wait somewhere else, the journey was a tedious one, and when we arrived it was raining hard and blowing very strong, and I remember as we drove from the railway station catching sight through the streaming window glass of the white waves of the sea rushing like bodies of snow out of the pale haze of the rain and the spray, and I also remember that I heard a strange low voice of thunder in the air, made by the huge breakers as they tumbled in hills of water upon the beach and rushed backwards into the sea in sheets of froth.