. The North Devon coast. not know whatWoolsery is like : only this, that the village ofWoolfardisworthy is indicated. But even inNorth Devon, where time goes something slowly,life is not long enough to always pronounce theword as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of nosign-post is long enough to contain the whole of it ;and so the district has cast away, like so muchuseless lumber, half its length. Down on the right hand goes the road, stagger-ingly steep, to Bucks Mill, a little cranny in thetowering wooded cliffs, where a huge limekiln anda few white cottages hang crazily over the
. The North Devon coast. not know whatWoolsery is like : only this, that the village ofWoolfardisworthy is indicated. But even inNorth Devon, where time goes something slowly,life is not long enough to always pronounce theword as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of nosign-post is long enough to contain the whole of it ;and so the district has cast away, like so muchuseless lumber, half its length. Down on the right hand goes the road, stagger-ingly steep, to Bucks Mill, a little cranny in thetowering wooded cliffs, where a huge limekiln anda few white cottages hang crazily over the has made a pretty picture of Bucks,as it is called for short—or more properly, Bucksh —with a distant glimpse of the housesof Clovelly, pouring like a cataract down the faceof the cliffs, and a still more distant peep of old, old tale of the original inhabitants ofBucks Mill having been wrecked Spaniards isstill told. You hear that story of many seasidehamlets in the West ; but I. for one, fail to see. BUCKS MILL 207 the swarthiness, the obvious foreign origin, of thepresent men, women, and children of Bucks, sodwelt upon in guide-books. When I found myself down at the bottom ofthat profound descent and at Bucks Mill, it beganto rain : the hopeless dogged rain that comesdown out of a leaden sk}^ deliberately, as thoughit were determined to rain all night. I sat in aleaky shed on a heap of sand and waited. . Still waiting ! Some one has written, some-where, that ignorance is the parent of wonder,and all this while I had been wondering manythings—wondering if it were going to rain allnight ; wondering if it were not better to push onto Clovelly ; wondering if one would get very wetif a start were made now ; wondering why itshould be a law of Nature that hopeless rain shouldset in when one was in an exposed situation andwith a considerable distance yet to go. . Betterchance it. And so, pushing the bicycle up that long, steepascent, which in descending had seem
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectdevonen, bookyear1908
