cal charities," was not exacted of them at
the New Road Gate, on the strength of their being residents, and
personal friends of the owners of Clovelly Court. A few steps farther
brought them to the top of a zig-zag path, sloping sharply downward at
an angle of some sixty-five degrees, paved with broad stones, and
flanked on either side by houses, no two of which occupied the same
level, and which seemed to realize their precarious footing, and hug the
rift in which they were planted as limpets hug a rock.

This was the so-called "Clovelly Street," and surely a more
extraordinary thing in the way of a street does not exist in the known
world. The little village is built on the sides of a crack in a
tremendous cliff; the "street" is merely the bottom of the crack, into
which the ingenuity of man has fitted a few stones, set slant-wise, with
intersecting ridges on which the foot can catch as it goes slipping
hopelessly down. Even to practised walkers the descent is difficult,
especially when the stones are wet. The party from Stowe were familiar
with the path, and had trodden it many times, but even they picked their
steps, and went "delicately" like King Agag, holding up umbrellas in one
hand, and with the other catching at garden palings and the edges of
door-steps to save themselves from pitching headlong, while beside them
little boys and girls with the agility of long practice, went down
merrily almost at a run, their heavy, flat-bottomed shoes making a
clap-clap-clapping noise as they descended, like the strokes of a mallet
on wood.

Looking up and above the quaint tenements that bordered the "street,"
other houses equally quaint could be seen on either side rising above
each other to the top of the cliff, in whose midst the crack which held
the village is set. How it ever entered into the mind of man to utilize
such a place for such a purpose it was hard to conceive. The
eccentricity of level was endless, gardens topped roofs,
gooseberry-bushes and plum-trees seemed growing out of chimneys, tall
trees rose apparently from ridge-poles, and here and there against the
sky appeared extraordinary wooden figures of colossal size, Mermaids and
Britannias and Belle Savages, figure-heads of forgotten ships which old
sea-captains out of commission had set up in their gardens to remind
them of perils past. The weather-beaten little houses looked centuries
old, and all had such an air of having been washed accidentally into
t