On hearing that the Parliament was in possession,
he threw his despatches overboard. These were afterwards recovered and
sent up to Parliament, where they were found to be of a very important
nature--in fact, the discoveries made in them were said to have had some
effect in deciding the fate of King Charles himself.
We had now to face our return journey to Totnes, so we fortified
ourselves with a substantial tea, and then began our dark and lonely
walk of twelve miles by the alternative route, as it was useless to
attempt to find the other on a dark night. We had, however, become quite
accustomed to this kind of thing, and though we went astray on one
occasion and found ourselves in a deep and narrow road, we soon regained
the hard road we had left. The thought of the lovely country we had seen
that day, and the pretty places we had visited, cheered us on our way,
and my brother said he should visit that neighbourhood again before
long. I did not treat his remark seriously at the time, thinking it
equivalent to the remarks in hotel books where visitors express their
unfulfilled intention of coming again. But when on May 29th, 1873, a
lovely day of sunshine, my brother departed with one of the handsomest
girls in the village for what the newspapers described as "London and
the South," and when we received a letter informing us that they were
both very well and very happy, and amusing themselves by watching the
salmon shooting up the deep weir on the River Dart, and sailing in a
small boat with a sail that could easily be worked with one hand, and
had sailed along the river to Dartmouth and back, I was not surprised
when I found that the postmark on the envelope was TOTNES.
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