That
She Had Been To Other Villages And Towns - Axmouth, And Seaton,
And Beer, And To Salcombe Regis And Sidmouth, And Once To
Exeter; But Never, Never Had She Seen A Place Like Branscombe
- 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 202 of 298
Words from 55341 to 55649
of 82198
