Her enthusiasm was very delightful; and, when baby cried, in the excitement of talk she opened her breast and fed it before me.  A pretty sight!  But for the pure white, blue-veined skin she might have been taken for a woman of Spain—­the most natural, perhaps the most lovable, of the daughters of earth.  But all at once she remembered that I was a stranger, and with a blush turned aside and covered her fair skin.  Her shame, too, like her first simple unconscious action, was natural; for we live in a cooler climate, and are accustomed to more clothing than the Spanish; and our closer covering “has entered the soul,” as the late Professor Kitchen Parker would have said; and that which was only becoming modesty in the English woman would in the Spanish seem rank prudishness.

In the afternoon I came to a slender stream, clear and swift, running between the hills that rose, round and large and high, on either hand, like vast downs, some grassy, others wooded.  This was the Branscombe, and, following it, I came to the village; then, for a short mile my way ran by a winding path with the babbling stream below me on one side, and on the other the widely separated groups and little rows of thatched cottages.

Finally, I came to the last and largest group of all, the end of the village nearest to the sea, within ten minutes’ walk of the shingly beach.  Here I was glad to rest.  Above, on the giant downs, were stony waste places, and heather and gorse, where the rabbits live, and had for neighbours the adder, linnet, and wheatear, and the small grey titlark that soared up and dropped back to earth all day to his tinkling little tune.  On the summit of the cliff I had everything I wanted and had come to seek—­the wildness and freedom of untilled earth; an unobstructed prospect, hills beyond hills of malachite, stretching away along the coast into infinitude, long leagues of red sea-wall and the wide expanse and everlasting freshness of ocean.  And the village itself, the little old straggling place that had so grand a setting, I quickly found that the woman in the cottage had not succeeded in giving me a false impression of her dear home.  It was just such a quaint unimproved, old-world, restful place as she had painted.  It was surprising to find that there were many visitors, and one wondered where they could all stow themselves.  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.  It was their bedroom.  The relations between the villagers and their visitors