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 names. It took much correspondence with her London publishers, Messrs. Double & Pepys, to discover that she made her home with Lady May Bracey, Square Mount Castle, Porlock Weir, North Devon. Such an address and the prospects of a castle and a Lady moved Lanice deeply. Double & Pepys intimated that Miss Champion would see her, and so she set out.

The train took her only to Bath, and from there, in whirling post-chaises and coaches, she jingled and tooted across England. A Roman road shot, like an arrow, over the Mendip Hills. Barrows and tumuli, ferns waist-high, stunted trees, sheep, rain, wind, and little sun; but always the sway of the coach, the smell of wet bracken, the rumble of wheels, the clatter of hoofs, the snap of a whip. Dolls' villages, dolls' churches, twisting dolls' lanes. And so on...

After the steep drop down into the Vale of Avalon, the coaches grew poorer, the horses shaggier and smaller, and the dialect of the natives almost incomprehensible. In spite of difficulties with speech, the inns, with their sanded floors, red earthen jugs, and huge beds, were hospitable. Exmoor at last. The coach ran part of the way in a groove between green hedges, bristling with life, sometimes rising eighteen feet above the roadbed. The hedges shut one in.

A broken axle, a mired coach, the heaving, wildeyed horses jumping furiously against their collars, harnesses breaking, and an unexpected night in a lonely farmhouse, where the owls in a walnut tree hooted all night, and no one slept.