6/15 The explanation was that those who visited Branscombe knew it, and preferred its hovels to the palaces of the fashionable seaside town. No cottage was too mean to have its guest. I saw a lady push open the cracked and warped door of an old barn and go in, pulling the door to after her--it was her bed-sitting-room. I watched a party of pretty merry girls marching, single file, down a narrow path past a pig-sty, then climb up a ladder to the window of a loft at the back of a stone cottage and disappear within. |