CHAPTER X
1850
On October 11, 1849, we again left England for Pau. The reason given was the weakness of my lungs that continued, or was supposed to continue. Actually, the thought of quitting Devonshire for the sunny South jumped with my father's wishes. He could not endure the prospect of a winter at Lew. We had few neighbours, and such as we had my father did not relish. Although passionately fond of horses, he did not hunt, and he was no sportsman with his gun. The neighbouring squirarchy were all hunters, sportsmen and magistrates, and the conversation over the port wine when the ladies had withdrawn turned on runs and shoots and on petty-sessional affairs. The clergy were still duller. They talked of old Betty's cough, and the legs of Polly that ran, or rather had sores in them that ran. Moreover, the roads were bad, so that going out to dinner was almost impossible in winter. In its place was instituted "High Tea" in the afternoon—the table spread with meat, cakes, tart, cream, coffee and wines on the sideboard. By this institution it was possible to struggle through the dreary months from November to the end of March, by this means getting home before dark. But it was a struggle for all that. My father could expect to find more congenial society abroad, and more accessible; it was something indeed to escape from gloomy skies and raw and damp air.
Moreover, my father was not of an adaptable nature. He despised Dartmoor scenery because no glaciers slid down the sides of the Tors. He scoffed at our two Lydford waterfalls because one was on a slope, and the other was a dribble. Who would care to look at them after the falls of Schaffhausen, Handeck and the Staubbach? And what was the pink flush of the heather that was only visible for a month in autumn to the sheets of
167
