LITMIR.BIZ

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      Babs has never seen the real sea, except in pictures, and is rather hazy about it. Nevertheless, Sammy’s stories are very wonderful, and doubtless very graphic. The sail is lowered at last, and the saucy Merry Maiden moored to a green bank.

      The dinner is served, and all hands, including Jim, do justice to it.

      I said the barge was “moored” here. Literal enough, for a wide, wild moor stretches all around. Sheep are feeding not far off, and some droll-looking ponies that Jim would like to engage in conversation. There are patches of heath also, and stunted but prettily-feathered larch-trees now hung with points of crimson. Great patches of golden gorse hug the ground and scent the air for yards around. Linnets are singing there, and now and then the eye is gladdened by the sight of a wood-lark. Sometimes he runs along the ground, singing more sweetly even than his brother musician who loves to soar as high as the clouds.

      Here is a cock-robin, looking very independent and lilting defiance at everybody. Robins do not always live close to civilisation. This robin comes close enough to pick up the crumbs which Ransey throws towards him. He wants Ransey to believe that all the country for miles and miles around belongs to him – Cock-Robin – and that no bird save him has any real business here.

      There are pine-trees waving on the hills yonder, and down below, a town much bigger than any they yet have arrived at.

      But see, there is a storm coming up astern, so, speedily now, the Merry Maiden is once more under way.

      Babs is bundled down below, and Bob goes with her.

      Presently the air is chilly enough to make one shiver. A puff of high wind, a squall we may call it, brings up an army of clouds and darkness. Thunder rolls, and the swift lightning flashes – red, bright, intense – then down come the rain and the big white hailstones. These rattle so loudly on the poop deck, and on the great tarpaulin that covers the cargo, that for a time the thunder itself can scarcely be heard.

      But in twenty minutes’ time the sun is once more shining, the clouds have rolled far to leeward, the deck is dry, and but for the pools of water that lie in the hollows of the hard tarpaulin, no evidence is left that a summer storm had been raging.

      But away with the storm has gone the wind itself, and Jim is once more called into requisition. Then onwards floats the barge.

      Through many a bridge and lock, past many a hamlet, past woodlands and orchards, and fields of waving wheat, stopping only now and then at a village, till at last, and just as the sun is westering, the distant town is reached.

      Oh, a most unsavoury sort of a place, a most objectionable kind of a wharf, at which to pass a night.

      Tandy sends Babs and Bob below again; for a language is spoken here he does not wish the child to listen to, sights may be seen he would not that her eyes should dwell upon. Yonder is an ugly public-house with broken windows in it, and a bloated-faced, bare-armed woman, the landlady, standing with arms akimbo defiantly in the doorway. Ah! there was a time when Tandy used to spend hours in that very house. He shudders to think of it now.

      There is one dead tree at the gable of this inn, which – half a century ago, perhaps – may have been a country hostelry surrounded by meadows and hedges. That tree would then be green, the air fresh and sweet around it, the mavis singing in its leafy shade. Now the sky is lurid, the air is tainted, and there is smoke everywhere. Not even the bark is left on the ghastly tree. It looks as if it had died of leprosy.

      But the work is hurried through, and in a comparatively short time the Merry Maiden is away out in the green quiet country.

      What a blessed change from the awful town they have just left!

      The sun has already gone down in such a glory of crimson, bronze, and orange, as we in this country seldom see.