a little
inn at Sleights, where the scones are good; or, better still, a
leafy garden full of raspberry-bushes at Cock Mill, where they give
excellent jam with your tea, and from which there are three ways of
walking back to Whitby when there's not enough water to row--and
which is the most delightful of those three ways has never been
decided yet.

Then from the stone pier we watch a hundred brown-sailed Cornish
fishing-smacks follow each other in single file across the harbor
bar and go sailing out into the west as the sun goes down--a most
beautiful sight, of which Marty feels all the mystery and the charm
and the pathos, and Chips all the jollity and danger and romance.

Then to the trap, and home all four of us _au grand trot_, between
the hedge-rows and through the splendid woods of Castle Rohan; there
at last we find all the warmth and light and music and fun of
Marsfield, and many good things besides: supper, dinner, tea--all in
one; and happy, healthy, hungry, indefatigable boys and girls who've
been trapesing over miles and miles of moor and fell, to beautiful
mills and dells and waterfalls--too many miles for slender Marty or
little Chips; or even Bob and Chucker-out--who weigh thirty-two
stone between them, and are getting lazy in their old age, and fat
and scant of breath.

Whitby is an ideal place for young people; it almost makes old
people feel young themselves there when the young are about; there
is so much to do.

I, being the eldest of the large party, chummed most of the time
with the two youngest and became a boy again; so much so that I felt
myself almost a sneak when I tactfully tried to restrain such
exuberance of spirits on their part as might have led them into
mischief: indeed it was difficult not to lead them into mischief
myself; all the old inventiveness (that had got me and others into
so many scrapes at Brossard's) seemed to come back, enhanced by
experience and maturity.

At all events, Marty and Chips were happier with me than without--of
that I feel quite sure, for I tested it in many ways.

I always took immense pains to devise the kinds of excursion that
would please them best, and these never seemed to fail of their
object; and I was provident and well skilled in all details of the
commissariat (Chips was healthily alimentative); I was a very
_Bradshaw_ at trains and times and distances, and also, if I am not
bragging too much, and making myself out an Admirable Crichton,