sunlight, going into her prismatic spirit, comes out a
magnificent rainbow of happiness. So when the idea came that they might
let me have the girl to take abroad that summer, her friend, the girl
spirit in me, jumped for joy. There was no difficulty made; it was one
of the rare good things too good to be true, that yet are true. She did
more for me than I for her, for I simply spent some superfluous idle
money, while she filled every day with a new enjoyment, the reflection
of her own fresh pleasure in every day as it came.

So here we were prowling about the south of England with "Westward Ho!"
for a guide-book; coaching through deep, tawny Devonshire lanes from
Bideford to Clovelly; searching for the old tombstone of Will Cary's
grave in the churchyard on top of the hill; gathering tales of
Salvation Yeo and of Amyas Leigh; listening to echoes of the
three-hundred-year-old time when the great sea-battle was fought in the
channel and many ships of the Armada wrecked along this Devonshire
coast. And always coming back to sleep in the fascinating little "New
Inn," as old as the hills, built on both sides of the one rocky ladder
street of Clovelly, the street so steep that no horses can go in it, and
at the bottom of whose breezy tunnel one sees the rolling floor of the
sea. In so careless a way does the Inn ramble about the cliff that when
I first went to my room, two flights up from the front, I caught my
breath at a blaze of scarlet and yellow nasturtiums that faced me
through a white-painted doorway opening on the hillside and on a tiny
garden at the back.

The irresponsible pleasure of our first sail the next afternoon was
never quite repeated. The boat shot from the landing like a high-strung
horse given his head, out across the unbordered road of silver water,
and in a moment, as we raced toward the low white clouds, we turned and
saw the cliffs of the coast and the tiny village, a gay little pile of
white, green-latticed houses steeped in foliage lying up a crack in the
precipice. Above was the long stretch of the woods of Hobby Drive.
Clovelly is so old that its name is in Domesday Book; so old, some say,
that it was a Roman station, and its name was Clausa Vaillis. But it is
a nearer ancientness that haunts it now. Every wave that dashes on the
rocky shore carries a legend of the ships of the Invincible Armada. As
we asked question after question of our sailor, handsomer than ever
to-day with a red silk handke