Here we stopped at a house very different from the Ship Inn, for it looked as if it had been built the day before yesterday.  Everything was new and shiny, and we had our supper at a long table with about twenty other people, just like a boardinghouse.  Some of their ways reminded me of the backwoods, and I suppose there is nothing more modern than backwoodsism, which naturally hasn’t the least alloy of the past.  When the people got through with their cups of coffee or tea, mostly the last, two women went around the table, one with a big bowl for us to lean back and empty our slops into, and the other with the tea or coffee to fill up the cups.  A gentleman with a baldish head, who was sitting opposite us, began to be sociable as soon as he heard us speak to the waiters, and asked questions about America.  After he got through with about a dozen of them he said: 

“Is it true, as I have heard, that what you call native-born Americans deteriorate in the third generation?”

I had been answering most of the questions, but now Jone spoke up quick.  “That depends,” says he, “on their original blood.  When Americans are descended from Englishmen they steadily improve, generation after generation.”  The baldish man smiled at this, and said there was nothing like having good blood for a foundation.  But Mr. Poplington laughed, and said to me that Jone had served him right.

The country about Lynton is wonderfully beautiful, with rocks and valleys, and velvet lawns running into the sea, and woods and ancestral mansions, and we spent the day seeing all this, and also going down to Lynmouth, where the little ships lie high and dry on the sand when the tide goes out, and the carts drive up to them and put goods on board, and when the tide rises the ships sail away, which is very convenient.

I wanted to keep on along the coast, but the others didn’t, and the next morning we started back to Chedcombe by a roundabout way, so that we might see Exmoor and the country where Lorna Doone and John Ridd cut up their didoes.  I must say I liked the story a good deal better before I saw the country where the things happened.  The mind of man is capable of soarings which Nature weakens at when she sees what she is called upon to do.  If you want a real, first-class, tooth-on-edge Doone valley, the place to look for it is in the book.  We went rolling along on the smooth, hard roads, which are just as good here as if they was in London, and all around us was stretched out the wild and desolate moors, with the wind screaming and whistling over the heather, nearly tearing the clothes off our backs, while the rain beat down on us with a steady pelting, and the ragged sheep stopped to look at us, as if we was three witches and they was Macbeths.

The very thought that I was out in a wild storm on a desolate moor filled my soul with a sort of triumph, and I worked my tricycle as if I was spurring my steed to battle.  The only thing that troubled me was the thought that if the water that poured off my mackintosh that day could have run into our cistern at home, it would have been a glorious good thing.  Jone did not like the fierce blast and the inspiriting rain, but I knew he’d stand it as long as Mr. Poplington did, and so I was content, although, if we had been overtaken by a covered wagon, I should have trembled for the result.