night-light burning on the wash-handstand. Whenever I woke up in the
night the light would show me the shadow of the water jug upon the
ceiling. It looked like an old, old man, with a humped back, walking
the road, bowed over his cudgel.

I am not going to say very much about my life during the next few
years. My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, and no great
fondness for the children of others. Sometimes I was very lonely
there; but after my tenth birthday I was at school most of my time, at
Newton Abbot. I used to spend my Easter holidays (never more than a
week) with the kind woman who put me to bed that night of my journey.
My summer and winter holidays I spent with my uncle and aunt in their
little house above the trout-stream.

The trout-stream rose about three miles from my uncle's house, in a
boggy wood full of springs. It was a very rapid brook, nowhere more
than three or four feet deep, and never more than twenty feet across,
even near its mouth. Below my uncle's house it was full of little
falls, with great mossy boulders which checked its flow, and pools
where the bubbles spun. Further down, its course was gentler, for the
last mile to the sea was a flat valley, with combes on each side
covered with gorse and bramble. The sea had once come right up that
valley to just below my uncle's house; but that was many years
before--long before anybody could remember. Just after I went to live
there, one of the farmers dug a drain, or "rhine," in the valley, to
clear a boggy patch. He dug up the wreck of a large fishing-boat, with
her anchor and a few rusty hoops lying beside her under the ooze about
a foot below the surface. She must have sailed right up from the sea
hundreds of years ago, before the brook's mouth got blocked with
shingle (as I suppose it was) during some summer gale when the stream