CHAPTER VII.
SAIL TO BRANSCOMBE—HORSES CARRYING COALS.
ALICE and Beatrice,’ said grandmamma one morning, ‘make haste and eat a good breakfast, for we are going to spend the day at Branscombe.’
‘Branscombe! Oh, how nice, grandmamma! But how are we going? Are we going to walk?’
‘No, dear children, we are going in a boat. The weather is so fine to-day, and there is so little wind, and John Bartlett tells me he thinks that it will remain fine; and therefore we will go in his boat to Branscombe, and see the beautiful rocks there.’
Alice and Beatrice made haste; they were very much pleased to go in a boat, for they had never been before on the sea. The little girls would have eaten no breakfast, unless grandmamma had told them that the sea air would make them very hungry, and that they must try and eat their breakfast properly. They were told that they were to have their dinner at Branscombe, which pleased them much.
The cook had provided a nice dinner, and had packed it into a basket; and the gardener carried it down the steep path and steps to the sea-shore.
At last grandmamma said, ‘Now you have been very good children; run upstairs, and ask Mary to dress you.’
Alice and Beatrice ran upstairs; and whilst Mary was taking out their hats and jackets, they both sat down on the carpet and pulled off their shoes, and put on their thick boots, and stood very quiet when Mary buttoned their little white jackets and tied on their hats.
‘I will put your cloaks with your grandmamma’s,’ said Mary, ‘because it will be cold when you come back.’
‘Cold!’ cried Alice, ‘this hot day. Oh, Mary, we cannot want our cloaks!’
‘On the sea it is often cold, Miss Alice; and it may be late when you return,’ added Mary.
The three cloaks were put together, and the children were glad to see that Mary was to come with them in the boat.
When they came to the shore, there was John Bartlett waiting for them, and a very nice large boat, half on the sand and half in the water, and there was another sailor there, and a little boy.
Little Beatrice said, ‘Grandmamma, that is Jack; I know Jack, he brings us nice shrimps for our tea; don’t you Jack?’ and the boy smiled. ‘I am so glad that Jack is going with us.’
The sea was very smooth, and the tide was neither high nor low, and there were no waves.
The children were lifted into the boat, after grandmamma and Mary had walked along a sloping plank into it, and had seated themselves at the end, where there were cushions, and Alice and Beatrice sat on the cushions on each side of their grandmamma.
Bartlett and the little boy jumped into the boat; and the other man first pushed the boat deeper into the sea, going into the water himself, and then climbed into the boat; and Bartlett and his boy, each with an oar, rowed a little till they were away from the shore, and the boat tossed up and down, and Alice and Beatrice came close to grandmamma and looked afraid.
Grandmamma then took Beatrice on her lap, and said—
‘A boat always rocks up and down at first; as soon as the sails are up, it will be much quieter.’
So they did not cry; but Beatrice said, ‘I should like to go back best.’
‘May we go back?’ asked Alice.
‘No, dear children, you must wait a little, and then I think that you will like the boat very much. Look at little Jack Bartlett, how he helps his father to unroll the sail and to pull the ropes.’
The children looked, and saw the sailor and his boy unroll a large piece of cloth; they knew that it was a sail, and they saw the men pull it up a high pole, which Alice told her sister was called a mast. The sail was red, and had a little hole in it. The wind blew upon the sail and made it straight; then the two men put up another sail, and little Jack came to sit near grandmamma, at her end of the boat.
There was so much to look at, that the children soon forgot their fear, and Alice asked—
‘What is Jack doing at our end of the boat?’
‘He is steering, miss,’ said Bartlett.
‘But what is steering?’
‘Steering means guiding the boat; and this is done by a piece of wood at the end, which Jack moves backwards and forwards in the water, and this makes the boat go to the right or to the left, as his father tells him.’
‘How funny that is! How can a bit of wood make a boat go one way or another?’ said Alice.
‘I cannot explain it to you now, dear Alice; but when you are older I will show you how it moves, and what it does. This piece of wood is called the rudder;’ and Alice watched the rudder some little time.
‘Why is there a hole in the sail, Jack?’ asked little Beatrice. ‘Is the sail old?’
‘No, little miss,’ said Bartlett, ‘it is quite a new sail; but a lady let her dog make that hole only last week.’
‘Why did she let her dog make that hole and spoil your new sail?’ asked Alice.
‘The lady was playing with her dog, as she sat on the beach, and threw stones for him to fetch; and at last she threw a stone on to the sail, that was lying next my boat, and the dog jumped upon the sail, and turned it over the stone, and then he bit and gnawed at the sail to get it out. The lady did not think what harm she did me in letting her dog make a hole in my new sail,’ said the boatman.
‘Did she not give you anything for the mischief her dog had done?’ asked grandmamma.
‘No, ma’am, nothing; and she did not even say that she was sorry, but took no notice, and walked away.’
‘That was naughty of her,’ said Beatrice; ‘I will not let our good dog Wolf bite any sail.’
The wind filled the sails, and the boat glided quickly through the water. The children began to enjoy the pleasant movement, and liked to watch the mark in the water that the boat left behind it; and asked if they might put their hands into the clear green water, which grandmamma allowed them to do.
Alice soon cried out, ‘Oh, grandmamma, how far I can see into the sea! How deep it is, and how green, and how pretty!’
‘Very pretty,’ repeated Beatrice; and both children looked long over the side of the boat.
‘What is Jack doing now?’ asked the children suddenly, when they saw the boy unwind some cord from a piece of wood, and throw the end of it into the sea; then he threw another piece of cord, and then another, till at last there were four strings in the sea, two on each side the boat.
‘He is fishing,’ said grandmamma.
‘Fishing!’ cried Alice; ‘please tell me how he is fishing.’
‘Each of these cords has a hook at the end of it,’ said grandmamma, ‘and on each hook is a little bit of fish or meat. When the fish try to catch hold of it to eat it, the hook sticks in their throats, and they cannot get away.’
Just now Bartlett called to his boy, and said, ‘Jack, you have got a fish on that line;’ so Jack pulled up the line—and it was a very long piece of string—and at the end hung a fish. The boy took it and put it into the other end of the boat, and threw his line in again. The fish jumped at first up and down, but it soon lay still; and soon several other fishes were caught, and all thrown together into the end of the boat.
The little girls were sorry, for they did not like seeing the fishes hurt.
‘Jack,’ said his father, ‘go back to the rudder, for we must try and land soon. There is Branscombe now, young ladies.’
The children looked and saw that they were coming quite close to the land again. The rocks were no longer red in colour, as at Salcombe, but white, and very different in shape; and there was a wide valley between these rocks and hills, and a very few houses were in the valley, not far from the sea-shore.
‘What a large ship that is! Shall we go close to it?’ asked Alice.
‘Yes, quite close, miss; it is full of coals, and the people on board are putting the coals into sacks, and then they let down the sacks into those big boats.’
Their boat soon came quite near the large ship, which grandmamma told the children was called a collier, because it always carried coals from one place to another. The children looked hard at the ship, as they had never been so close to a ship before. Then they sailed past the collier, and soon came up to the big black boat, and saw that it was full of sacks of coals, and they soon passed that. Beatrice thought that the men who were rowing the boat looked very black and dirty.
‘The coals make the men black, Beatrice,’ aid Alice. ‘If we played with coals, our hands and our dresses would be quite black too.’
‘But do these men play with the coals?’ asked little Beatrice.
‘No; to be sure they do not. Did you not see how the men put the coals into the sacks, and how the dust flew about on the ship? That is enough to make anybody black and dirty.’
The boat now came nearer and nearer to the land, and the little girls looked eagerly, and asked how they should get on shore.
‘Quite easy, little miss,’ said Bartlett. ‘Now, please sit quite quiet, and we will run her on shore. But please, ma’am, will you sit in the middle of the boat?’ which grandmamma and Mary did immediately; and the two sailors let down the sails, and took the oars and rowed hard, and in a very few minutes the boat went on to the shore, the one end much higher than the other end. The men jumped on to the shore; and when the next wave came and lifted the boat, they pulled it by a rope, and brought it up much higher on the shore.
‘Please take me out, Bartlett,’ cried Beatrice. ‘And me too,’ said Alice. ‘May we go, grandmamma?’ asked the children; and as the answer was ‘Yes,’ the children went to the higher end of the boat, and were lifted on to the shore, and grandmamma and Mary and Jack followed them. The great basket that the cook had packed was taken out, and the cloaks and umbrellas.
‘Take all the things up to the farm-house, please, Bartlett,’ said grandmamma, ‘and tell Mrs. Wilmot that we shall soon come up.’
The children, in the meantime, were looking at something which amused them very much.
There were a number of horses—about twenty (for Alice counted them)—which all walked, one after each other, with no one to guide them, up to the big black boat that had brought the sacks of coal, and had just reached the shore. The horses, one after another, went into the water to the side of the boat; and when the men had laid a sack of coals across each horse’s back, the horses went away out of the water in a row, and up the shore, and carried the sacks in front of a large house, where some men took off the sacks, emptied each sack, and threw them over the backs of the horses, which then turned round and went back again to the boat. Thus there were always two rows of horses, one row going to the sea, and the other returning loaded with sacks of coals.
The little girls were very much pleased to see how clever the horses were—how regularly they went, never stopping behind, but on and on till they reached the right place. They liked to see each horse come up to the edge of the sea, put down its head for an instant, as if to see how deep the water was, and step in until it reached the boat, then wait till its turn came, and take the place of the last horse that was loaded. The horses did not seem to mind the waves that washed up against them, for the tide was high, and there were more waves than when the children landed.
After Alice and Beatrice had looked a long time, they turned away from the sea, and went up the path that led through a green field up the side of the valley, and followed their grandmamma till they came to an old farm-house.
They were very hot and tired, for the path was long and very steep, and the sun shone bright, and they found the weather much warmer on the land than on the sea.
There was a large tree in front of the house, and it was so shady and cool there, that grandmamma asked the farmer’s wife if she would let them have a table and some chairs under the tree, as they would like to sit in the shade, and eat their dinner out of doors.
Mrs. Wilmot, the farmer’s wife, then ordered a table and some chairs, and Alice and Beatrice sat down and rested a little, for they were tired; but very soon they began to run up and down the sloping side of the hill, and laughed when some sheep that were feeding there began to run about too; and they chased the sheep about, till at last the sheep leaped over the hedge at the end of the field, and began to jump from one rock to another.
Alice and Beatrice followed the sheep; but, on going through the gate, they saw that they were near the sea, which lay below the steep cliff; and large pieces of white rock, that sparkled in the sun, lay half-way down, as if they had fallen down.
‘You must not go so near the edge,’ said Mary, who had followed them. ‘Miss Beatrice, give me your hand, and I will let you look down into the sea.’
‘I can take care of myself,’ said Alice; ‘please let me, Mary. Oh, I never saw such beautiful rocks! I wish that grandmamma were here, she would like so much to see them. What is that large white piece further on—it goes so far into the sea?’
‘That is Portland, a sort of island; it is a long way off; only to-day the air is so clear that we can see it easily. But we must go back to your grandmamma,’ added Mary. ‘Are you not hungry?’
‘Oh yes, so hungry, Mary! Let us go back to the nice farm-house.’ And they ran quickly back again.
Alice and Beatrice found the table spread with a white table-cloth, and some nice things on it ready for their dinner. The farmer’s wife had lent some plates, and had put some milk and some cream on the table, and some of her own brown bread; and the children drank the milk, and grandmamma gave them some fruit tart, with a little of the nice cream.
‘It is very good of the farmer’s wife to give us such nice things,’ said Alice; ‘everything tastes so much better than what we have at home, I think. But I was very hungry and thirsty; perhaps that’s why I like everything so much to-day.’
“I think that is one of the reasons, dear Alice,’ was the answer.
‘It is nice to have our dinner under this tree: do you not like it, grandmamma!’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘And so do I, grandmamma,’ said little Beatrice.
