It is partly Sally Meade’s Southern accent that has made me love her above nearer cousins, from her babyhood.  The modulations of her voice seem always to bring me close to the sound of the voice that went into silence when Geoffrey Meade, her father’s young kinsman, was killed long ago.

The Meades, old-time planters in Virginia, have been very poor since the distant war of the sixties, and it has been one of my luxuries to give Sally a lift over hard places.  Always with instant reward, for the smallest bit of sunlight, going into her prismatic spirit, comes out a magnificent rainbow of happiness.  So when the idea came that they might let me have the girl to take abroad that summer, her friend, the girl spirit in me, jumped for joy.  There was no difficulty made; it was one of the rare good things too good to be true, that yet are true.  She did more for me than I for her, for I simply spent some superfluous idle money, while she filled every day with a new enjoyment, the reflection of her own fresh pleasure in every day as it came.

So here we were prowling about the south of England with “Westward Ho!” for a guide-book; coaching through deep, tawny Devonshire lanes from Bideford to Clovelly; searching for the old tombstone of Will Cary’s grave in the churchyard on top of the hill; gathering tales of Salvation Yeo and of Amyas Leigh; listening to echoes of the three-hundred-year-old time when the great sea-battle was fought in the channel and many ships of the Armada wrecked along this Devonshire coast.  And always coming back to sleep in the fascinating little “New Inn,” as old as the hills, built on both sides of the one rocky ladder street of Clovelly, the street so steep that no horses can go in it, and at the bottom of whose breezy tunnel one sees the rolling floor of the sea.  In so careless a way does the Inn ramble about the cliff that when I first went to my room, two flights up from the front, I caught my breath at a blaze of scarlet and yellow nasturtiums that faced me through a white-painted doorway opening on the hillside and on a tiny garden at the back.

The irresponsible pleasure of our first sail the next afternoon was never quite repeated.  The boat shot from the landing like a high-strung horse given his head, out across the unbordered road of silver water, and in a moment, as we raced toward the low white clouds, we turned and saw the cliffs of the coast and the tiny village, a gay little pile of white, green-latticed houses steeped in foliage lying up a crack in the precipice.  Above was the long stretch of the woods of Hobby Drive.  Clovelly is so old that its name is in Domesday Book; so old, some say, that it was a Roman station, and its name was Clausa Vaillis.  But it is a nearer ancientness that haunts it now.  Every wave that dashes on the rocky shore carries a legend of the ships of the Invincible Armada.  As we asked question after question of our sailor, handsomer than ever to-day with a red