and the balmy Devon air, laden with warm moisture from the Gulf Stream. To the southward, and in the shelter of the swelling downs, the stems of the trees are covered with mosses, and they break out in thickets of boughs. To seaward, the trunks are clean and weatherscoured; and where branches have been thrown out, they are bare and stunted as so many stags' horns without the velvet. The cliff-path, as it goes winding along beneath the trees, has the green park, rolling upwards through rough sheep - pastures to the downs, on the one side, while on the other it cuts across promontories and the heads of the rugged combes, which sink perpendicularly to the sands. On the one side are the sleek and drowsy red Devons, sadly bothered by the flies, as they crowd together in the coolest and darkest of the shadows; on the other are the sea-fowl or the jackdaws, circling restlessly between the sea and the cliffs, and the rabbits rustling among the bracken and the brambles, which are matted in an impenetrable undergrowth. After a tolerably substantial lunch at the New Inn, where they had tempted you with hill-mutton and newly caught lobsters, one is naturally somewhat drowsy. In languid admiration of the beauties all about, you sit down on the stem of a fallen tree, and, in memory of Raleigh and Kingsley and Sebastian Yeo, light up a pipe of tobacco. As your eyes wink and close, you are evoking fancies from smoke-land-it may be the influences of the soothing narcotic, or the balmy softness of that southern air, or the droning murmur of the bees in the scented blossoms of the furze. You think of the Devon adventurers setting out for western climes, which could scarcely be more beautiful, and

were certainly less salubrious. You dream of Raleigh dreaming of the golden realms of an imag inary Manoa, and of his gallant half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, gilding the fogs of Newfoundland with delusive reflections from the golden ventures of Cortes and Pizarro. You nod, and the pipe has fallen and gone out, when you are startled out of sleep by a crashing, as of wild cattle making a plunge through the covers skirting southern savannahs. And in reality it is one of the peaceful North Devons of the Park, maddened out of all endurance by the plague of flies, and blindly charging at the fag-end of a broken park-fence. But, unlike the swine of the Gadarenes, he does not take a header down the hill. On the contrary, he seems to be brought up with a round turn by the sunshine and the bright sea-view; and after standing a panic-stricken statue for a few seconds, he wheels round and gallops back by the way he came. Inclined to abuse him at first, you are soon ready to bless the beast, for you find that an hour has slipped away in your day-dream. You have barely time to reach the bold headland beyond the woods, whence the eye may wander over the distant landscapes, looking down over rocks clothed in young oak saplings and carpeted along the ledges with purple ling, and over a succession of thickly timbered combes melting away into mists on the horizon. Then you must hurry back to catch the steamer, marvelling and congratulating yourself that among some seventy or eighty fellow - excursionists, not one has taken that romantic walk through the Park. By the way, before leaving the Park we are reminded of another novel, or rather novelette, with which it is associated. The tragic

scenes of 'The Picture's Secret,' by Mr Walter Pollock, were laid in the house and grounds, with which the writer had an old and familiar acquaintance. It was in the Park, and on the precipices looking over the moonlit sea, that the guilty pair of lovers had their stolen meetings. It was in the house that the organ made mysterious music; and that the family picture, with its prophetic fatalism, precipitated the dramatic catastrophe.

Clovelly has always been a hamlet clinging to the rocks in the shadows of the woods, that are literally "hangers "; a place where it might be said, as at Morlaix in Brittany, it is but a single step from garret to garden. The only possible spot for landing is on the strip of beach, strewed as thickly with loose stones as the slopes of any quarry. But Barnstaple and Bideford, glorified in Westward Ho!' have been seaports of some renown from time immemorial, much to the disadvantage of the dwellers in the surrounding country in ancient days, for they were favourite recruiting stations for the piratical Norsemen. Yet Barnstaple bar, which shallows the broad estuary of the Taw united to the Torridge, must have always had an evil reputation. Many a galley and good ship has come to grief there. Even now Barnstaple Bay is a dangerous trap in fogs for vessels that are bound up Bristol Channel; and it was apropos to Barnstaple bar that Kingsley wrote his melancholy song of "The Three Fishers," which has the merit, both in the words and the music, of making a dreary theme profoundly depressing. Kingsley glorifies both Barnstaple and Bideford,-in fact, to borrow an Americanism, he "cracks them up." Unquestionably one and the

other enriched themselves under the later Tudors and the Stewarts by daringly speculative commercial enterprise; and they bred a race of hardy seamen, who often found their most celebrated captains in the heads or sons of old county families. The Grenvils and the Gilberts, the Raleighs, the Stuckleys, and the Leighs, have stamped their names and memories on our naval history; while the Drakes and Hawkins, sprung from the people, carried "niggers' heads," and such appropriate emblems of a successful traffic in "ebony," on the scutcheons they had won by their gallantry and grand seamanship. Nevertheless, in following the older chroniclers, according to the soundest county historians, Kingsley exaggerates the importance of the trade of those ports, with the number of the ships they sent on transatlantic expeditions and against the Invincible Armada. Yet, in the main, his pictures of their prosperity under the Virgin Queen are as true as they are vivid. It was rather animated individual energy than natural advantages which, in the infancy of our commerce, gave some fortunate little Devonshire borough a

favourable start. When a merchant made profits in successful foreign voyages, having been lucky enough to engage the services of daring adventurers, his next-door neighbours and rivals immediately rushed into the field. The biggest of the ships were of small burthen; and sea-captains, who had tried to face the Northwest Passage, who had gone_groping among the fogs off the Banks of Newfoundland, or threading their way through the Keys of the West Indies, thought little of the trivial hazards awaiting them on their own threshold, in

the shape of the sandbanks and shallows of Barnstaple bar.

Barnstaple and Bideford, if they did not run Bristol hard, can certainly have been no very long way behind it when Amyas Leigh was going from Borrough to the Bideford Academy. So we should expect to find in Bideford solidly built medieval houses, with their sculptured doorways and the monograms of merchant princes in miniature, such as are still to be seen at King's Lynn or Dartmouth. But if we are charmed with Clovelly, we are disappointed in Bideford. The old town is more than decently well to do, but it has been thoroughly modernised. The steep main streets are as broad as that of Clovelly is narrow, and the houses are almost invariably comfortable and commonplace. The old church, where Mrs Leigh, with all the landed dignitaries of the district, went to give thanks for the return of her son and his companions from their circumnavigation of the world, has been restored, or rather rebuilt. Little of the former fabric, except the noble square tower, has been left standing. The long bridge itself, the famous bridge of Bideford, which had become a household word with all the medieval patriots of North Devon, has been rejuvenated and disfigured out of all recognition. The interminable row of arches still spans the broad tidal stream; but, thanks to the widening and the throwing out of a footway on either side, they have almost disappeared under the superstructure they support. That superstructure is so heavily plated with metal as sorely to try the old foundations; and the only very visible proof of antiquity is an intimation by the Borrough authorities, with a warning as to traction

engines and the abuse of heavy traffic.

Old Salterne used to entertain Amyas, and other ship captains with whom he did business, at the "Ship Inn," where Frank Leigh gave the great entertainment that founded the famous brotherhood of the Rose. The "Ship" has disappeared, with its great bay-windows looking out upon the shipping, which has vanished likewise. Now the local sea-trade is done from Appledore, two or three miles farther down the river. But the "Ship" has a satisfactory modern successor in "Fortescue's," immediately above bridge, which, like it, fronts full upon the Torridge.

On

an

While leisurely lunching, the sole sign of maritime enterprise I saw was a boatman pushing out from the bank, to recover a scull floating up on the flood. a ramble afterwards up the streets and round the town, the only thing that recalled the Bideford of the Elizabethan age was occasional name on a street corner or on one of the inns. There was the "Porto Bello," suggestive of voyages to Panama; and the "Peal o' Bells," which might have been meant to commemorate the return of successful adventurers. There was the "Newfoundland," no uncommon sign in these parts, a sad tribute to the memory of the gallant and unfortunate Gilbert. Allholland Street and Bridgeland Street certainly smacked of medievalism; but, in conspicuous inconsistency, at the corner of the former is the cheap haberdashery establishment of the Bon Marché; while both streets lead up to heights that have been suburbanised with smug villas, detached and semi-detached, all christened with the stereotyped wateringplace names. It was a pleasure,

on retracing one's steps to the quais, to come upon a Grenvil House, "a seminary for young ladies," kept by the Misses Yeo. Possibly they are collateral descendants of old Sebastian, for I fancy that Amyas Leigh's trusty follower never married. And at any rate, there is something appropriately welcome in a reminder of Bideford's long association with the Grenvils, who had settled there originally with a Norman, Saxon, and Briton following, on lands given by the Conqueror.

These quais, and the shady promenades prolonging them along the banks of the Torridge, are the most attractive feature in modern Bideford. They remind one of an Antwerp or a Rotterdam on a small scale, with all the trade drained away. Sweets .to the sweet, sleepiness to the stagnant; and there is a congenial drowsiness about them of a sultry afternoon. What a paradise for the workworn that promenade would be, were it only close to Wapping or Rotherhithe! As it is, the visitor has it pretty much to himself, though one or two of the benches are occupied by slumberers; and these rare slumberers seem to be weather-beaten naval veterans "in retreat," who, like Yeo, should be blessing Raleigh for the boon of tobacco. The view down the river towards its estuary is enchanting, with the broad saltwater flood sparkling and winding under the hanging banks and the black fir woods; and with the masts of the shipping off Appledore in the distance, confounding themselves with the stems of tapering pine-trees, and with the telegraph-posts of the railway on the opposite shore.

The Torridge is the river of Bideford, as the Taw is the river of Barnstaple, and nothing can be

more striking than the contrast between their channels at high water and at low. Coming from Ilfracombe to Barnstaple at the ebb in the forenoon, we skirt a wide expanse of white sands and salt-water pools, where sea-gulls are clamouring and herons are fishing, and which are skimmed from time to time by a whistling flight of dunlins or sandpipers. Barnstaple is stranded high and dry; it seems as if nothing but a flat-bottomed scow could ever get up to the bridge. But when we go back to Barnstaple from Bideford late in the afternoon, the railway is skirting a majestic stream, which apparently, in the language of the guide-books when expatiating on maritime advantages, might float ironclads of any draught, with no necessity for taking soundings. And really, though that expanse of water is a sham, ships of tolerable size are coming up on the tideway; while small river-craft, with their tarsmeared sails, are tacking about merrily between shore and shore.

As for Barnstaple, though its municipal antecedents may be interesting to the antiquarian, for it boasts of extraordinarily ancient charters, there is little to be said about it from the picturesque point of view. Not that it is not prettily and even romantically situated; but being bigger, more bustling, and more prosperous than Bideford, it is become even more conventionally respectable. The municipal authorities have done much for the welfare of the citizens, as the stranger is almost sorry to observe. They have rebuilt and purified a network of narrow medieval streets. They have encouraged railways, and have been gratified by a couple of termini, one in the very heart of the town, and within a stone's

throw of the markets.

At Barnstaple, too, they have rejuvenated a venerable bridge which used to be the curious rival of that of Bideford. At Barnstaple, as at Bideford, they have got something like a Rotterdam Boompjes, where the shadows of the foliage fall over the quais; and they have gone the length of laying out pleasant public gardens, confided to the honour and guardianship of the burghers.

Further away to the southward there is much that is interesting to be visited. There are the ruins of the Augustine Abbey of Hartland, near Hartland Point; and beyond that again, within the borders of Cornwall, is the site of Stow, the seat of the Grenvils. If we may judge from what is to be seen there nowadays, Kingsley must have exaggerated the sylvan beauties of Sir Richard's Park—although the views from the heights both on the sea and the land sides must always have been strikingly wild and picturesque. Stow, by the way, is in the wild parish of Morwenstow, on the confines of Cornwall and Devon. For more than forty years the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker laboured as vicar among a scattered population which he found as rugged and forbidding as their own sterile rocks, and apparently as unfruitful as their own barren moorlands. But those rough Cornish folk brought forth much good fruit before their worthy vicar was lost to them. Hawker was a remarkable man in many ways, and must have been decidedly eccentric. He had some hereditary right to literary talent, for he was grandson of Dr Hawker, the Calvinistic divine, whose Morning and Evening Portions' had at one time an immense circulation. As a youth he showed strong intellectual tastes, and it

was a sad disappointment when his father told him that he could not afford to let him complete his university career. But young Hawker's decision was promptly taken. He went straightway and proposed to a woman with some property. property. It is true she was his senior by twenty years, but the money paid his college expenses. Dr Phillpotts, the famous Bishop of Exeter, offered him the preferment of Morwenstow, with little expectation of his accepting it. The Bishop did not believe that so brilliant a man would hide his light under a bushel at the back of the world. But Hawker closed at once with the offer, and resigned himself to life-long banishment. No vicar had been settled in Mor

wenstow for a hundred years. Hawker found everything to be done. He built a vicarage and schools; he had the ruined church restored; he threw a bridge over a river, previously only to be passed by a perilous ford.

He is said to have been extremely liberal to the poor, and he used the influence he gained by his charities for their religious and social improvement. To use a common phrase, he found "his work cut out for him," for lawless traditions and habits still lingered on the storm - lashed coast among the descendants of smugglers and wreckers. Not the least important of his parochial duties was saving lives imperilled at sea, and burying washed-up corpses in the overcrowded little churchyard, with its rude memorials of shattered ships' timbers and crossed oars, which offered the last hospitality to all comers.

One letter printed in the short biographical notice prefixed to Hawker's 'Poems' tells of his efforts to save the crew of the Margaret Quayle, by inducing the boatmen to put out to the