So it had been at Falmouth. A ship entering port has a thousand eyes
upon her, and the _Pickle's_ errand could not be hidden. The news
seemed in some mysterious way to have spread even before he stepped
ashore there on the Market Strand. A small crowd had collected, and,
as he passed through it, many doffed their hats. There was no
cheering at all--no, not for this the most glorious victory of the
war--outshining even the Nile or Howe's First of June.
He had set his face as he walked to the inn. But the news had
flown before him, and fresh crowds gathered to watch him off.
The post-boys knew . . . and _they_ told the post-boys at the next
stage, and the next--Bodmin and Plymouth--not to mention the boatmen
at Torpoint Ferry. But the countryside did not know: nor the
labourers gathering in cider apples heaped under Devon apple-trees,
nor, next day, the sportsmen banging off guns at the partridges
around Salisbury. The slow, jolly life of England on either side of
the high road turned leisurely as a wagon-wheel on its axle, while
between hedgerows, past farm hamlets, church-towers and through the
cobbled streets of market towns, he had sped and rattled with
Collingwood's dispatch in his sealed case.
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