erything was fresh after heavy showers
during the night. The houses rise in terraces up the sharp hillside
fronting the harbor, which was literally a forest of fishing-boat masts.
A rather crude stone statue of William stands on the quay and a brass
foot-print on the shore marks the exact spot where the Dutch prince
first set foot in England, accompanied by an army of thirteen thousand
men. Our car attracted a number of urchins, who crowded around it and,
though we left it unguarded for an hour or more to go out on the
sea-wall and look about the town, not one of the fisher lads ventured to
touch it or to molest anything--an instance of the law-abiding spirit
which we found everywhere in England.
From Brixham, an hour's drive over bad roads brought us to Dartmouth,
whither we had been attracted by the enthusiastic language of an English
writer who asserts that "There is scarcely a more romantic spot in the
whole of England than Dartmouth. Spread out on one of the steep slopes
of the Dart, it overlooks the deep-set river toward the sea. Steep
wooded banks rising out of the water's edge give the winding of the
estuaries a solemn mystery which is wanting in meadows and plough-land.
In the midst of scenery of this character--and it must have been richer
still a few centuries back--the inhabitants of Dartmouth made its
history."
As we approached the town, the road continually grew worse until it was
little better than the average unimproved country highway in America,
and the sharp loose stones everywhere were ruinous on tires. It finally
plunged sharply down to a steamboat ferry, over which we crossed the
Dart and landed directly in the town. There are few towns in England
more charmingly located than old Dartmouth, and a hundred years ago it
was an important seaport, dividing honors about equally with Plymouth.
The road to Dartmouth was unusually trying; the route which we took to
Plymouth was by odds the worst of equal distance we found anywhere. We
began with a precipitous climb out of the town, up a very steep hill
over a mile long, with many sharp turns that made the ascent all the
more difficult. We were speedily lost in a network of unmarked byways
running through a distressingly poor-looking and apparently quite thinly
inhabited country. After a deal of studying the map and the infrequent
sign-boards we brought up in a desolate-looking little village, merely a
row of gray stone, slate-roofed houses on either si
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