“But there are practically no trout in the Alph,” said Coleridge. CHAPTER XI THE THRESHOLD I THE next evening, when Edwin and his father reached Bristol, a steady drizzle had set in from the west. They pushed their bicycles out of the station yard at Temple Meads and rode between slippery tramway lines towards a small hotel, a stone’s-throw from Bristol Bridge, where Mr. Ingleby had decided to put up for the night. “It’s no use trying to ride on to Wringford this evening,” he said, “for the wind will be against us and it’s collar work most of the way. I think we can be comfortable here to-night. I used to know the landlord of this place. He was a Mendip man.” The Mendip landlord, of course, had been dead for many years, having made his descent by the route that is particularly easy for licensed victuallers; but it happened that his daughter had married the new tenant, and this woman, a comfortable creature who spoke with the slight burr that appeared in Mr. Ingleby’s speech in times of anger or any other violent emotion, welcomed them for her father’s sake, and gave them a bare but cleanly room on the second story. The windows of this room looked down obliquely on to the tidal basin of the Avon, thronged with small coasting tramps and sailing ships: and Edwin was content to stay there watching them; for he had never seen the traffic of a harbour before. It was still too wet to think of going out onto the quays; but even from a distance the misty spectacle, enveloped in veils of driving rain, was romantic. Edwin watched while a pair of busy tugboats pushed and pulled and worried the hull of a wooden schooner in to mid-stream. The water was high, and she was due to catch the falling tide to Avonmouth. Whither was she bound? He did not know. Perhaps her way lay down channel to pick up a cargo of bricks from Bridgewater. Perhaps she was setting out at that moment to essay the icy passage of the Horn. Perhaps, in another four months, she would have doubled the Cape and lie wallowing in the torpid seas about Zanzibar. It inspired Edwin to think that he was standing at one of the gateways of the world. From the site of the stone bridge above their lodging, just four hundred years ago, the Venetian pilot, Cabot, had cast loose in the selfsame way, and sailed westward with his three sons, Lewes, Sebastyan, and Sancto, to the mainland of unknown America. To-day, from the same wet quays, other adventurous prows were stretching forth to the ends of the earth. To China . . . To Africa. _Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end_.