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Updated: May 18, 2025
The sun was shining and they felt rested, and quite ready once more to shoulder their kit and set out on the march. There was nothing of very great interest to see in Dropwick itself, though it was a quaint enough old-fashioned market-town, with a fifteenth-century church tower, and a few black and white houses.
"Couldn't we possibly stop here?" implored Verity. But Miss Strong, having booked rooms in Dropwick, was adamant. "Besides which I wouldn't trust the beds here," she remarked. "So early in the year they're almost bound to be damp, and we don't want any of you laid up with rheumatic fever as the result of our trip. I prefer to give a wayside inn a week's notice if I mean to sleep there in April.
Nobody has had enough coal during the winter to keep fires going in spare bedrooms. That front room was as chilly as a country church! You won't feel so tired, Verity, when you're on your feet again, and it's all downhill to Dropwick." The Temperance Hotel, where the girls finally stayed their weary feet, was quite modern and unromantic, though well aired and fairly comfortable.
Even the mistress herself, so wise at the outset, finally flung prudence to the winds, and skirmished through the coppices with enthusiasm equal to that of her pupils, lured from the pathway by the glimpses of kingcups, or the pursuit of a peacock butterfly. "All the same, if we tear round like small dogs, we shall never reach Dropwick to-night, and I've booked our rooms there," she assured them.
The foss-way, leading from Ryton-on-the-Heath to Dropwick, was their handiwork, and our pilgrims were to march on the identical track of some old Roman legion. It must be owned that when tea was finished they were very unwilling pilgrims, and would gladly have spent the night at The Pelican and have slept in the funny, musty, low-ceiled little bedrooms upstairs.
She apologized for the absence of cake, but it was an omission that nobody minded. Upland air gives good appetites, and, though Miss Strong reminded her flock that this was only a meal by the way, and that supper was ordered for them at Dropwick, they set to work as if they would taste nothing more till midnight.
"It will be a real open-air holiday," she assured them. "We shall be out of doors all day long and eat most of our meals by the roadside. I've planned it out carefully. A short railway journey to Carford, then walk by easy stages through Ryton-on-the-Heath to Dropwick and Pursborough, where we can get the train again back to Grovebury.
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