anscombe--not one that she liked half so well. How strange that I
had never been there--had never even heard of it! People that went
there sometimes laughed at it at first, because it was such a funny,
tumbledown old place; but they always said afterwards that there was no
sweeter spot on the earth.

Her enthusiasm was very delightful; and, when baby cried, in the
excitement of talk she opened her breast and fed it before me. A pretty
sight! But for the pure white, blue-veined skin she might have been
taken for a woman of Spain--the most natural, perhaps the most lovable,
of the daughters of earth. But all at once she remembered that I was a
stranger, and with a blush turned aside and covered her fair skin. Her
shame, too, like her first simple unconscious action, was natural; for
we live in a cooler climate, and are accustomed to more clothing than
the Spanish; and our closer covering "has entered the soul," as the
late Professor Kitchen Parker would have said; and that which was only
becoming modesty in the English woman would in the Spanish seem rank
prudishness.

In the afternoon I came to a slender stream, clear and swift, running
between the hills that rose, round and large and high, on either hand,
like vast downs, some grassy, others wooded. This was the Branscombe,
and, following it, I came to the village; then, for a short mile my way
ran by a winding path with the babbling stream below me on one side,
and on the other the widely separated groups and little rows of thatched
cottages.

Finally, I came to the last and largest group of all, the end of the
village nearest to the sea, within ten minutes' walk of the shingly
beach. Here I was glad to rest. Above, on the giant downs, were stony
waste places, and heather and gorse, where the rabbits live, and had for
neighbours the adder, linnet, and wheatear, and the small grey titlark
that soared up and dropped back to earth all day to his tinkling little
tune. On the summit of the cliff I had everything I wanted and had come
to seek--the wildness and freedom of untilled earth; an unobstructed
prospect, hills beyond hills of malachite, stretching away along the
coast into infinitude, long leagues of red sea-wall and the wide expanse
and everlasting freshness of ocean. And the village itself, the little
old straggling place that had so grand a setting, I quickly found
that the woman in the cottage had not succeeded in giving me a false
impression of her dear home.