Alice and Beatrice

								

piece of string—and at the end hung a fish. The boy took it and put it
into the other end of the boat, and threw his line in again. The fish
jumped at first up and down, but it soon lay still; and soon several
other fishes were caught, and all thrown together into the end of the
boat.
The little girls were sorry, for they did not like seeing the fishes
hurt.
‘Jack,’ said his father, ‘go back to the rudder, for we must try and
land soon. There is Branscombe now, young ladies.’
The children looked and saw that they were coming quite close to the
land again. The rocks were no longer red in colour, as at Salcombe, but
white, and very different in shape; and there was a wide valley between
these rocks and hills, and a very few houses were in the valley, not far
from the sea-shore.
‘What a large ship that is! Shall we go close to it?’ asked Alice.
‘Yes, quite close, miss; it is full of coals, and the people on board
are putting the coals into sacks, and then they let down the sacks into
those big boats.’
Their boat soon came quite near the large ship, which grandmamma told
the children was called a collier, because it always carried coals from
one place to another. The children looked hard at the ship, as they had
never been so close to a ship before. Then they sailed past the collier,
and soon came up to the big black boat, and saw that it was full of
sacks of coals, and they soon passed that. Beatrice thought that the men
who were rowing the boat looked very black and dirty.
‘The coals make the men black, Beatrice,’ aid Alice. ‘If we played with
coals, our hands and our dresses would be quite black too.’
‘But do these men play with the coals?’ asked little Beatrice.
‘No; to be sure they do not. Did you not see how the men put the coals
into the sacks, and how the dust flew about on the ship? That is enough
to make anybody black and dirty.’
The boat now came nearer and nearer to the land, and the little girls
looked eagerly, and asked how they should get on shore.
‘Quite easy, little miss,’ said Bartlett. ‘Now, please sit quite quiet,
and we will run her on shore. But please, ma’am, will you sit in the
middle of the boat?’ which grandmamma and Mary did immediately; and the
two sailors let down the sails, and took the oars and rowed hard, and in
a very few minutes the boat went on to the shore, the one end much
higher than the other end. The men jumped on to the shore; and when the
next wave came and lifted the boat, they pulled it by a rope, and
brought it up much higher on the shore.
‘Please take me out, Bartlett,’ cried Beatrice. ‘And me too,’ said
Alice. ‘May we go, grandmamma?’ asked the children; and as the answer
was ‘Yes,’ the children went to the higher end of the boat, and were
lifted on to the shore, and grandmamma and Mary and Jack followed them.
The great basket that the cook had packed was taken out, and the cloaks