Those who have once fallen under the spell of Teignmouth are never likely to be freed from it. You leave, after perhaps the fifth or sixth visit, declaring you have exhausted the place, but you inevitably return, if not next year, in the near future. There is, in fact, something in Teignmouth to please all tastes, and custom never stales it. It enjoys that inestimable advantage in a seaside resort, a tidal estuary; and round by the sandspit, over against the bold red cliff of the Ness, you come from the somewhat artificial front and its pier and its seats for visitors, to the harbour, where the Teign flows out at the ebb and the sea comes swirling in at the flood, across the shifting sand-bar that from time immemorial has afforded a living for Teignmouth pilots and tug-boats, bringing the craft of strange skippers, ignorant of the state of the channel, safely into the haven. There are no seats, or other such concessions to visitors, in the harbour, but there are boats innumerable for sailing or rowing upon the Teign, and in the deep midstream anchorage to one side of the sandbank called “the Salty,” there is generally a tier of foreign barques that have brought deals from Norway, or are to take china-clay to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there are ropes and anchors and much waterside litter, and a fragrant scent of what the sailors call “Stockhollum” tar about the harbour; and if the visitor does not promptly succeed in tripping over the ropes and chains and anchors, why then he is an exceptional visitor indeed. Fragrant sail-lofts look down upon the water, and old superannuated buoys and other buoys that only want a lick of paint, are drawn up on the sand, and from the open windows of sailors’ homes come the voices of parrots, mingled not unmusically with a midstream yo-hoing.

The trade of Teignmouth harbour, after a long period of decay, is in these times looking up, for the South Devon Trading Company has built new quays and sheds, which, like all new things, do not add to the picturesqueness of the spot; but the casual lanes and odd slips remain, with the old quay, and that unconventional inn, “Newbery’s Old Quay Hotel,” that with every flood-tide dabbles its feet in the water, and with every ebb stands once more upon dry ground, much to the amazement and delight of children. Did I not myself once think the “Old Quay” inn the most desirable of all possible homes!

There is a homeliness in the harbour that draws the visitor away from the exotic front, and it is to the harbour he first resorts when he revisits Teignmouth, for it seems almost to welcome him back. There, up stream, is that hoary old landmark, the long bridge that spans the Teign, which is 1,671 feet in length, and was built in 1827, and is the longest wooden bridge in England. “Further on,” as the guide-book says, “are the gas-works.” It is only too true, and they might, with advantage to the scenery, be still further on; but in that case they would not get their coal barged cheaply up to the very walls, which everybody knows to be a greater consideration than the preservation of mere scenic amenities.

Away in the misty distance are the tors of Dartmoor, prominent among them Rippon Tor and Heytor Rocks, grey-bearded—as you know when you have visited them—with sage-green lichen, and altogether very reverend and inscrutable. They seem with a grave benevolence to welcome you back.

Above Teignmouth is Haldon, that vast expanse of tableland whose heights we first saw from Exmouth, and whose range—marked on maps “Great Haldon” and “Little”—extends across the whole of the back country between Exe and Teign. He who, in search of fresh air and vigour on some stewing day in the Teign valley, essays to climb from Teignmouth to Little Haldon, comes, very soon after he has set out, and very long before he has arrived, to the conclusion that the “littleness” of Little Haldon is a misnomer; for the way is long and the road steep. But once there, you are in another and more bracing climate, where the air is keen and charged with the scent of the bracken and the heather that clothe the wild moorland. From Haldon you look one way to the Exe and the other to the Teign, and, standing in one and the selfsame spot, can see both, for it is an exceeding high place. The solitude of it is perhaps intensified to some by the fact of Teignmouth’s cemetery being here; but it is a large and a populous place, and to those of us who knew in life many who lie here, this is no solitude. God rest them. The summer sun that shines on Haldon shines no more for them, nor winter storms blow.

Although Teignmouth has its literary and artistic associations, it does by no means obtrude them upon the stranger, who, indeed, only discovers them after some considerable pains, and is perhaps regarded as a little eccentric, for his trouble. Two poets—Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and John Keats—have described the town, and although Praed was not actually born here, the connection with the family was close, the Bitton property belonging to his father, who lies in the churchyard of West Teignmouth. Bitton, in fact, only passed from the Praeds in 1863. The poet was born in 1802 and died in 1839, when member of Parliament for Aylesbury.

There are reasons all-sufficient why Teignmouth’s poetic associations should not be flaunted. Too great insistence upon Praed would advertise more fully the brutal vandalism permitted of late years at Bitton, when no finger was stirred to save that lovely wooded riverside park from being cut up and demolished, to build cheap houses upon. Bitton was one of the loveliest places upon the Teign. In the words of Praed himself:

The “dark, rich groves,” were no mere poetic imagery. They were largely ilex, or “evergreen oak,” for which streets of the flimsiest houses in close-packed ranks are the sorriest exchange.

Keats, of course, no self-respecting Devonian would mention. He came, himself consumptive, to Teignmouth in 1818, to cheer the last hours of his brother Tom, dying of that disease. Here, lodging at No. 35, Strand, he completed Endymion and wrote Isabella; but it was winter and spring at the time of his sojourn, and although spring and winter in South Devon are preferable to those seasons elsewhere, he found the moist humours of the rainy West anything but pleasant:

“You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of ’em; the primroses are out, but you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them. … The flowers here wait as naturally for the rain twice a day as mussels do for the tide. This Devonshire is like Lydia Languish, very entertaining when it smiles, but cursedly subject to sympathetic moisture.”

But occasionally the weather was kinder. It does not rain all day and every day in Devon, even in winter; and during these dry interludes Keats discovered some of those amazingly many villages that owe their name to the Teign:

A poet en deshabille. Reduced from poetry to the matter-of-fact nomenclature of the ordnance maps, those places are Bishopsteignton, Kingsteignton, and Coombe-in-Teignhead—the “Cumeintinny” of local speech. The poet who might wish to know all the “Teign” villages and hamlets, would need to make acquaintance with Teignharvey and Stokeinteignhead, on the salt estuary; and thence find his way inland, to the back of Newton Abbot, where, beside the freshwater stream that comes prattling down from Dartmoor he shall find Teigngrace, Canonteign, and Drewsteignton.

For six miles above Teignmouth the Teign runs up salt: a broad estuary at high water: above the bridge an oozy expanse of mingled sand and mud flats at low; and “Newton Marsh,” the water-logged meadows just below the market town and important railway junction of Newton Abbot. Midway is Coombe Cellars, a waterside offshoot of Coombe-in-Teignhead; a place, you perceive, even in Keats’ time, it was the recognised thing to visit and—

It was then a highly rustic spot; the oddest little promontory jutting out into the stream, and on it the “Ferry Boat” inn, built behind stout sea walls, and itself built of whitewashed cob, and heavily thatched. The “Cellars” were fish cellars, and the place was, and is, oddly amphibious; the inn being half farmhouse and half fisherman’s tavern, the landlord himself a farmer down to the waist, and a fisherman as to the legs and the sea-boots. At night you would find him out with the trawl-nets, to sea; at low tide in the morning cockling on the mud-flats off his inn; and in the afternoon milking the cows or urging the plough in his hillside fields. To take boat from Teignmouth Harbour, and row up on the flood to tea at Coombe Cellars, returning with the ebb, was once a delightful thing, and, with a difference, is so still; but you must not expect to be the only party there—no, not by a very long way, and you must by no means expect to get your tea, with or without Devonshire junket, strawberries and cream, or cockles, in quite so rustic a fashion or at such moderate prices as once obtained. And, although the house remains very much the same as of yore, the thatch has given place to a something less rural.

CHAPTER XIII
SHALDON—LABRADOR—WATCOMBE—ST. MARYCHURCH—BABBACOMBE

At the point, just where the river and the sea meet, off the toy lighthouse, is the noblest view of the Ness, the great red bluff that turns a jagged front to the sea, and lifts a shaggy head of firs to the sky. With a dark and oily smoothness that betokens depth and strength of current, the estuary of the Teign empties itself at the ebb, and fills again with feathered spray on yonder rocks. Above Shaldon, opposite, rise the great hills, up whose sides climbs the road to Torquay: hills fertile to their very summits, and remarkable for their subdivision by hedgerows all the way up those staggering gradients. From nowhere better than from Teignmouth can this beautiful and characteristic feature of a Devonshire landscape be seen.

Let us leave Teignmouth here by the ferry-boat, in preference to walking over the long bridge. Both bridge and ferry belong to one company, and the toll each way, by either of them is the same modest penny. The ferry goes from one sandy beach to another, touching the opposite shore immediately under the roadway, the little forecourt gardens, and the bow-windowed houses of Shaldon, which seems to the stranger the oddest, brightest, cleanest and most quiet of townlets, and for a while puts Teignmouth in the shade. Shaldon, however, is very much of a “dead end,” a backwater, or still pool of life, and when the visitors are gone, when the children have deserted the warm sands, and the half-dozen ferry boats that are required in summer are reduced to two; and when nature, with autumn past, frugally turns the lights down until next spring, Shaldon is apt to be dull. But there is always the harbour to look out upon, and Teignmouth across the river; although, to be sure, there is the reverse view of the harbour and of Shaldon from Teignmouth. For myself, I incline to think the outlook upon the harbour and Shaldon and the hills from Teignmouth the best, especially since the appearance on the Bitton estate of those houses you wot of. But this is certain, while human nature remains true to itself: wherever you are not, there you would be, just as, whatever you are doing, you look forward to the doing of something quite different; or else, doing nothing, yearn to be busy, and being busy, long for idleness.

It is a rocky scramble round beyond the Ness to the open sea and Labrador, and no one, fortunately, has yet engineered a neat path that way. For one thing, it would be scarce worth the trouble of doing so while great fragments of rock come hurtling down from the cliff, thrust out by the frosts and thaws of winter. The way is strewn with these immense pieces of red conglomerate, weighing anything from five to twenty tons; and those who wear india-rubber shoes and can best imitate the chamois in rock-leaping are those who like best the exploration of the Ness. For others there is that “harvest of the quiet eye” down in the rock-pools that the tide has left, where, among the trailing seaweeds, the limpet clings with the tightness of a moribund government clinging to power, and only to be removed in the same way; by the sudden, unexpected blow, like the Parliamentary snap-division; where transparent things, showing their inwards in the most indelicate way, flit about unconcerned at that publicity, and the hermit-crab justifies his sponsors by hurrying, presto, to some rocky cell when you disturb this little mare clausum.

Tumbled rock-heaps, alternating with beaches, lead to the foot of the cliff by whose up-on-end path you breathlessly reach Labrador, a place known to every one who has visited Teignmouth. Local traditions tell how this cottage and garden, half-way up the four hundred feet of cliff, were the work of a retired sea-captain who, settling here from a long career in the Newfoundland trade, christened the place by the name it still bears. I do not suppose he ever contemplated it being converted into a picnic inn, but he may have had an eye to a snug little traffic in smuggling, for which in his time it must have been especially adapted.

However that may be, there is no questioning the popularity of Labrador, where teas are provided and swings tempt the giddy-minded, and roses clamber over the house-front in a manner suggestive of Persia and Omar Khayyàm. Why, with leisure—and genius—one might compose another Rabaiyat when the tea-takers were gone.

“I reckon,” says one of the soil, whom we meet here and exchange remarks with, “Twize up and down es a gude day’s work,” and it really is a leg-aching job to climb to the top of the cliff, which must be done to gain the Torquay road. South Devon is sleepy, and, experiencing this steepest of paths and hottest of hot corners, the stranger is not surprised. At any time it is possible to sit down and drop into a “bit of a zog”—which is Devonian for a nap.

The Torquay road is inexorably hilly and white and hot, but it looks inland down on to samples of Canaan, where, amid a blue haze of fertility, you see trees and grass more nearly blue than green, among the freshly turned fields that are red. It is a land of fatness. There, down in those folded valleys, is a distant glimpse of the Teign, with the white-faced, yellow-thatched cottages of “Stokeintinny” and “Cumeintinny” enwrapped in an air of prosperity; and here is the ridge-road, like an oven. “Aw! my dear sawls, ’tes tar’ble hot.”

Here stands the old toll-house the country folk call “Solomon’s Post”; but why? Ah! he who pervades the country asking for the reasons of things is not to be envied. For my part, the likeliest reason of this name is that the tolls on this turnpike-trust may have been farmed by one of those numerous Jews who took up that class of business.

Lanes on the left-hand presently lead down to Minnicombe and Maidencombe, where there are embowered hamlets giving upon the sea; and in another mile yet another leads down to Watcombe. Watcombe is not what it was fifteen years ago. Then a countryfied lane opened out upon a grassy valley dropping to the sea. From the turf there soared aloft the ruddiest of all the ruddy cliffs of South Devon, seamed and seared with the weathering of ages, and as thickly pocketed with holes as a Post Office poste-restante rack. The cliff is there, as ever, and the holes, and the pigeons and jackdaws that inhabit them, but the undergrowth has grown up in dense and tangled masses everywhere, the hedges of the rustic lane have given place to stone walls, and all the pleasant approaches are enclosed in the grounds of somebody’s private domain. Confound Somebody, say I: may the dogs defile the grave of his great-great-grandmother. But let us take these outrages as calmly as we may, or not seek to further explore; for the approach to Torquay through Babbacombe and Marychurch is a perfect orgie of Wall. It must have been a difficult and an expensive matter to so successfully shut out the scenery, but it has been so thoroughly done that when you do at last come to the cliff-top of Babbacombe Downs, the lovely clear outlook there over the sea and down to the beach seems, by contrast, like a hole in the wall.

But we anticipate, as the authors of Early Victorian novels were accustomed to remark, and have not finished with Watcombe, which is remarkable for having supplied the Romans with potters’-clay and for providing us moderns with the same material. The Watcombe Terracotta Works, that stand by the high road, were established somewhere about 1875. Their products of statuettes for advertising purposes are sufficiently well-known, and I dare not hazard a guess how many of that famous group, “You Dirty Boy!” the works produced for an eminent firm of soap-makers. When what has been called the “Æsthetic Craze” set in, and all manner of weird wares, alleged to have some “Art” quality, were thrust upon the public, the Watcombe terracottas were fashioned in the most awkward and “artistic” shapes, and painted with sunflowers and the most abhorrent colours, and in them that good, long-suffering public for a time found artistic salvation. But that was long ago, and the sunflower has wilted and the lily faded away. To-day, rustic humour and Old English models combined, capture the tourist. Puzzle-jugs and scraps of country talk find the readiest sale, and many a holiday-maker takes home with him butter-dishes, jugs, and plates with such legends as “Go aisy with the butter,” “Help yo’self to some Demsher crayme,” or that noble triolet—

Beyond Watcombe begins St. Marychurch. At the threshold of that suburb a long lane leads to the left, down to Pettitor, where there are busy quarries of Devon Marble, so greatly in favour with church-furnishers that specimens of it are nowadays to be found in use, not in England only, but in remote parts of the world.

You would not for a moment suspect the Domesday antiquity of St. Marychurch, but it appears in that remarkable work—as a church—the earliest, it is said, in Devon. Rebuilt in 1861, it is now merely one of the many ornate places of worship in which Torquay, with its large, rich and idle residential classes, greatly priest-ridden, abounds. Only the ancient font, sculptured with a number of engaging devils, remains.

St. Marychurch would probably not produce so much disfavour in the beholder were it not for its natural surroundings. This is a parable, but one easily resolved into a plain statement. The place is, in short, a bad nightmare of plaster. Quâ plaster, not so very shocking, but taken in conjunction with the exceptionally lovely nature of the scenery, nothing less than a crime. A wanton, indefensible crime, too, for the neighbourhood abounds with excellent limestone, most suitable for building. I conceive there must be something radically wrong—beyond a mere error of taste—with the generations that will go out of their way to use a short-lived pretence like plaster, when limestone, calculated to last until the universe shall again be thrown into the melting-pot, offers. But there, it is done, and not unless all Torquay itself were razed to the ground, and the place begun anew, could it be remedied. Oddly enough, the first signs of enlightenment in this direction are shown by the various banks, which are being substantially and tastefully built of honest materials.

The long, long streets lead past Furrow Cross, where, turning to the left, along the Babbacombe Down Road, that lovely opening, looking out upon the sea, is disclosed. Here, from the carefully railed-in cliff-edge, one looks sheer down on to the white pebble beaches of Oddicombe and Babbacombe, with winding walks through luxuriant greenery, leading hundreds of feet down to them. Red cliffs, white beaches, dark blue sea, light blue sky, and the cool green of the vegetation; what a feast of colour is the South Devon Coast! And the abounding growth of flowers and shrubs in the gardens on these heights! Geraniums, putting to shame the best efforts of ivy a-clinging and climbing: fuchsias, making growth like trees, with substantial trunks; veronica shrubs in hedges, the lovely blue masses of the heliotrope-like ceanothus, and others of the acclimatised beauties of the Southern Hemisphere: all these glories are rendered possible by the soft climate, which laps you as in cotton wool, and takes all the energy out of you, and has rendered the folk of Devon the kindly lotus-eaters they are.

CHAPTER XIV
BABBACOMBE—THE PEASANT SPEECH OF DEVON—ANSTEY’S COVE—KENT’S CAVERN

There are winding walks as I have said, down to Babbacombe, but for all their circumbendability (what a lovely word that is!) they are so steep that by far the easiest way to descend would be to get down on to your hinder parts, and slide. To those who are not so young as they were, the view down upon the beach of Babbacombe, and upon the roof-tops of its few houses is the better part, for the walking down jolts the internal machinery most confoundedly. Why, there are few more pitiful sights on this earth—which we know, on eminent authority, to be a “wale”—than that of a middle-aged and stout gentleman gingerly descending these walks, and sighing with envy as a troop of children dash, whooping, past him. Their actions have not yet begun to be regulated by their digestive apparatus!

But for all that indiarubber-like infantile irrepressibility, I have seen a little childish disaster here. It was a fall and a bruise and a scratched face that meant little, after all; but the howls of that child were worthy of an occasion infinitely more tragical. It were not worth dwelling upon, except that it opened out some rustic Devon talk, when a son of the soil set that injured innocent upon his feet again and said: “Well done! My eymers: ’av ’ee valled down?”

With so much sympathy on tap, my young martyr began to pity himself infinitely, and sobbed the more. “Did ’ur, then?” said that kindly comforter: “puir liddle bye, puir liddle bleed. You ’m proper ’urted yo’self, have ’ee. Where’s his mammy, then? Where do ’ee live tu? Coom ’ee up-along an’ zittee on this zeat,” and much else.

The neighbourhood of these exploited seaside towns are, however, not the places, as a general rule, in which to look for such fine survivals of old Devon talk. The villages and the hamlets are the last homes of it, and, generally speaking, the only times when an indweller hears the Doric is when a servant, fresh-caught from “Dartymoor” or other remote district, comes into residence. Then, indeed, one hears strange phrases. Then you learn, if you did not know it before, that in Devon all girls are “maads” and all boys “byes,” large or small; or I should say, in the Devon tongue, “gert” or “liddle.” In Devon most things that are thorough, or difficult, or to be expressed in terms of bigness or admiration are “proper,” and this expression, among some others, is not, like much else of the rustic talk, obsolescent. It is, indeed, common in towns, and seems, like the Devonian soft burring inflection, to be, after a period of disuse, coming back again.

Anything very large is thus said to be “proper gert”; a difficult task is still a “proper chore”; and—although to one not used to the West the propriety of it is not evident—a person helplessly intoxicated is “proper drunk,” or “durnk” may even be said; for (as in “gert” for “great”) your true West countryman will always, whenever humanly possible, depose the letter “r” from its proper place. He will overcome majestic difficulties in this linguistic way, and will even “urn” instead of “run.”

A Devonian never lives “at” a place, only “tu” it; baskets to him are either “flaskets” or “maunds”; he has a staggering way of saying “Well done!” as an exclamation of surprise, even on the most tragical occasions, so that he has seemed sometimes, to strangers who are not acquainted with this peculiarity, to be callously superhuman or less than human; which is a libel on the kindly race.

Babbacombe—the real Babbacombe of the beach, not the strange new thing on the cliff-top—is the tiniest of places, with the “Cary Arms” inn, a little stone fishing-pier, a few boats, a fortuitous concourse of lobster-pots, a windlass or two, and a general air of being a natural growth, as indeed it is. It seems remote from the evil passions of the world, but for all that seeming, it was the scene of a dreadful tragedy in 1884, when Miss Keyse, an elderly lady who lived in a picturesquely thatched cottage on the very margin of the beach, was murdered by John Lee, her manservant. He was a young footman, a native of Kingskerswell. The motive was said to have been revenge for the reduction of his wages by sixpence a week. The whole thing is sordid, and one had rather not mention it at all; only the notoriety of the case compels. Lee saturated the rooms with petroleum and set fire to the house, in the hope of concealing the evidence of his crime, but fortunately the fire was extinguished before it had made sufficient progress, and the marks on the body were discovered and Lee arrested. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and actually brought to the scaffold at Exeter Gaol; but there the strange and unparalleled circumstances occurred which saved him from execution and condemned him to lifelong imprisonment instead. Three several times the trap-door on which the condemned man stood refused to fall when the bolt was drawn, although each time, when he was led away, and it was tried, it worked properly. After the third attempt, it was decided, in the interest of the official spectators and of the wretched criminal himself, to prolong the harrowing scene no longer, and Lee was removed to his cell and a report sent to the Home Secretary who first respited him and then commuted the sentence to imprisonment for life.

These are supposed to be materialistic times, when everything is held to have some discoverable natural cause, and the failure of the trap is explained by the wood of it being swollen, and jamming every time a weight was placed upon it. But the affair was so remarkable, that very naturally the whole country was deeply stirred. Those who were present never lightly dismissed the subject, and for one’s self, it seems very like God’s protest against man’s injustice. But we, who were not present and are not thrown off our balance by the dreadful experience, must consider that in the long history of the world many innocent persons have been hanged, and Providence stirred no finger on their behalf, while many assassins have escaped the Avenger of Blood. It should be said that local opinion has always been strong in the belief of Lee’s guilt.

The house, one is glad to say, exists no longer. Only an outhouse which belonged to it remains, and the rest of the site is dense with trees and undergrowth. In spite of repeated rumours of his release, Lee is still in prison, nor does it appear likely that he will ever be permitted to go at liberty again.

One of the most famous spots on this coast is that to which we now come. Anstey’s Cove has been described and pictured times innumerable, and I—ah! me—am going to do it again. The way to the Cove lies in between the inevitable dead walls of the district: these the high and solid ones built by Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter some fifty years since, to enclose the grounds of his villa of “Bishopstowe” and keep the public out of all possible glimpses of this paradise: highly characteristic of a bishop.

These walls must have been extremely ugly when newly built, but nature, more kindly than the dignified clergy, has toned down the rawness, assuaged the harsh lines and set a green mantle over the bishop’s walls, so that they are now stony cliffs, lichened and moss-grown, rich in tiny ferns, and overhung by tall trees.

The bishop was, like many of the cloth, a man of sarcastic wit; for when a lady, visiting him at Bishopstowe, gushingly exclaimed how like Torquay was to Switzerland, he retorted very neatly with, “Yes, only there you have mountains and no sea, and here we have sea and no mountains.”

Anstey’s Cove is the same as ever: one of the few places that have not changed of late years. Still the path leads down ruggedly to the little beach of big white marble pebbles, still the hollow is filled with a wild ferny brake and with old thorn-trees, hung, like the liana-choked forest trees of South America, with tangled strands of wild clematis. And although the original Thomas, who, half a century ago supplied picnics with necessaries, has long since assumed his crown and robe of white up above, the poetic notice-board written for him still survives, and Thomases of a later generation are to be found in their wooden shanty on the beach, where they continue the traditions—or some of them—of:

Some enthusiastic scholar has even done this into Latin, and the result is seen on the wooden walls of the shanty.

White limestone pinnacles shut in the eastern side of the Cove, and shade off into pink and red and grey. On the western side a cliff path goes winding round the headland of Hope’s Nose and Daddy Hole Plain. The Hole there is a rift in the plateau, and “Daddy,” the affectionate name bestowed upon the Devil by local folk, who perhaps did not stop to consider when they did it that they thus proclaimed themselves children of Satan.

On the inland road to Torquay is that famous place, Kent’s Cavern, whose prehistoric contents led men of science to wholly revise their ideas of the world’s history.

The situation of Kent’s Cavern, although only a mile from the centre of Torquay and in the Wellswood suburb, is still semi-rural. A limestone bluff, shaggy with bushes, trees and ivy, rises abruptly to the right of the road, and in the side of it is a locked wooden door, upon which you bang and kick for the guide, who is guide, proprietor, and explorer in one. When he is not guiding, he is engaged in digging and turning over the wet red earth, alone in the dank lonesomeness with the spirits of prehistoric man and the bones of the extinct animals that ranged the valleys of Torquay when the world was young. The freehold of the famous cavern which ever since 1824 has been the theme of more or less learned geological treatises was recently sold at auction for a trifling sum; not to an institution or a scientific society but to the guide, who has conducted many geological pundits over it, and by consequence has acquired an air of greater omniscience than the most completely all-knowing of those not remarkably modest men of science.

No one really knows who was that Kent whose name the cavern bears. The popular notion that the place was only discovered in modern times is an error, for evidences exist of its being known through the Middle Ages, down to our own time. The prehistoric remains, and not the cavern itself, are the modern finds, and that there were visitors and curiosity-hunters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is evident in the names scratched on the rocky walls, and still visible through the slowly growing film of stalactite. Thus “William Petre, 1571,” writes himself, by the mere fact of his scribbling here, ancestor of the ’Arries of to-day, and of the same glorious company is one who boldly inscribes himself “Robert Hedges of Ireland, Feb. 20, 1688.” This was no Irishman, but a Devonshire yeoman from a farm or hamlet called “Ireland,” on the other side of Dartmouth.

It remained for modern times to thoroughly explore this natural rift in the limestone. There were several very potent reasons why this should not have been done before. Perhaps a little dread of the unknown was partly the cause; geological science was in its infancy, and in this then solitary neighbourhood there was no one leisured enough, or sufficiently interested, to investigate.

It was in 1824 Mr. Northmoore first broke into the stalagmite floor which to a depth of three inches formed a continuous covering, like concrete, to the red clay and its deposits of flint implements, charred bones, and relics of the hyæna, mammoth, reindeer, bison, bear, wild cat, and a host of other animals utterly extinct.

Above these relics of an almost incredible antiquity was a layer of black earth containing remains of the British and Roman periods, odds and ends of whetstones, spindle-wheels, bone awls and chisels, amber beads, bronze rings, pieces of Samian pottery, and cakes of smelted copper, intermingled with shells of sea-fish and bones of pigs, sheep, rats, rabbits, and birds; the discarded things of periods of occupation ranging from two thousand years ago; but, compared with the deposits of from ten to twenty thousand years earlier, beneath the stalagmite flooring, things merely of yester-year.

Northmoore’s discoveries, however, were few in comparison with those of the Rev. J. MacEnery, who, as Roman Catholic chaplain at Tor Abbey, had abundant leisure, and devoted three years, from 1825, to explorations here. He saw a sight that would have doubtless roused a dentist to wildest enthusiasm. Nothing less than “the finest fossil teeth I had ever seen.” He was followed by Pengelly, and by the long series of researches by the British Association, extending from 1864 to 1880, which resulted in the almost complete stripping of the cavern; so that we who explore Kent’s Cavern, the home of Prehistoric Man, to-day are very much in the position of visitors to a house that has had the brokers in, or a museum whose exhibits have been nearly all removed.

But there are still remains discovered which recall Pengelly’s description of the cave being tenanted at the same period both by men and wild animals; the cave-men going forth to fish or hunt and the hyænas looking in during their absence for anything worth picking up. And there are things belonging to remote geological periods which are of those discoveries that first upset the chronology of the Book of Genesis and gave staggering shocks to believers in the absolute literal accuracy of the Bible: teeth of wild animals, not merely in the deposits of the floor, but embedded in the limestone rock overhead. Who shall put a date to these?

And here, at our elbow all the while, is the guide, complacently pointing to all these things; lighting flares which disclose the roof, and playing scales with sticks on metallic-sounding stalactites that have been forming with incredible slowness, perhaps an inch in a thousand years, just to be made a show of. The best of all the stalactites is broken. It began to be formed when the world was young. It grew and grew with the drops of water, charged with lime, percolating from the roof, and being met by its fellow stalagmite with equal slowness rising from the floor. And stalactite and stalagmite had nearly met, and only wanted another three or four centuries to bridge the remaining interval of an eighth of an inch, when a visitor, falling accidentally against them, broke them off!

“What did you say?” one, with pardonable curiosity, asks the guide, and “What could you say?” says he; and when you consider it, what is there that would be equal to that tremendous occasion?

CHAPTER XV
ILSHAM GRANGE—MEADFOOT—TORQUAY

In this quiet and wooded nook near Kent’s Cavern, tucked away from the octopus arms of Torquay, is Ilsham Grange, a chance survival of those old times when Tor Abbey ruled the roast in these parts. Everything here was then agricultural. Not even a village, only the monks’ farm, relieved the solitude. Traces of those old farmers remain in the grey turret in the farmyard, where the pigeons flutter and the pigs grunt contentedly, blissfully unconscious of what pork, ham, and bacon mean. In this turret, now with the floors gone, Brother this, that, or t’other, sent over from the Abbey round the headland, lodged, and ruled from it the conversi, or lay-brothers, whose business it was to conduct the practical farming and to be as the Children of Gibeon, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the community.

From Ilsham you come, over the hill, to Meadfoot, a particularly noble bay, where the road is protected from the sea by a wall calculated to make a builder of cheap houses and nine-inch party-walls faint with horror at so prodigal a use of material. I do not know exactly how thick the Meadfoot sea-wall is, but a wheeled conveyance could be driven along it, if it were not so rough. And the roughness of these rudely quarried, undressed rocky boulders is just the fitting character for the spot; which is, as I have said, a very noble piece of coast-scenery indeed, rough-hewed by nature in the large, and coloured by her in the rich and sober hues of the rocks, alternating with the brighter tints of sea and grass. Great islanded rocks stand off-shore, glooming over the blue sea like ogreish strongholds: the black monstrous forms of the Ore Stone and the Thatcher Rock, with the smaller Shag Rock close in, and a scatter of reefs just off the sands.

Near by, but hidden from view by its enclosing grounds, is that semicircular group of villa residences, Hesketh Crescent, built, some forty years ago, on the model of the classic terraces of Bath and Buxton. Little postern gates lead from the grounds on to the road at Meadfoot, and from them the early riser on summer mornings may observe strange figures, clad in gorgeous dressing-gowns, shuffling in bath slippers to the sea, the bright sunshine making heliographs of their bald and shining pates. It all looks like some newer version of Robinson Crusoe, or the Swiss Family Robinson; but these old gentlemen are only the retired generals and colonels of Hesketh Crescent, out for their morning dip, and are so little like marooned inhabitants of uncivilised isles that they will presently enter their postern-gates again, and go home to breakfast and the morning paper, over which they will with fervour and unction damn the War Office and the Army from head to foot—a valued privilege denied to Robinson Crusoe.

The entrance to the awful sanctities of Hesketh Crescent is passed on the ascent from Meadfoot into Torquay; but the Crescent is not what it was, and boards, actually proclaiming houses to let, disfigure the proprieties of its threshold. As a matter of fact, the taste—or rather, the fashion—which obtained when Hesketh Crescent was built has wholly changed, and residents by the seaside are no longer content to live in a continuous row of houses. It is an unavoidable condition in great towns, but most undesirable for a place like Torquay, whose ideal is detachment, and whose chief feature, in the residential districts, away from the business centre, is the multitude of discreet villas, each enclosed in its grounds, behind masonry walls and shrubberies. If these villas were situated near the Regent’s Park district of London, the discretion of encompassing walls and screening shrubberies would be referred to motives not here to be discussed, but Torquay being what it is, these features are but marks of the strictly proper seclusion that is an essential feature of its existence; an emotionless existence punctuated by the visits of gibbering curates and the meetings of Dorcas Societies.

Nothing is more remarkable in the later history of Torquay than the number of “literary landmarks” and associations it has gathered to itself; more particularly associations connected with the spinster lady authors of improving stories. Torquay, of course, is not merely the place for invalid visitors in the winter, but a place of residence for many delicate persons to whom its genial warmth is the very breath of life. It would seem that when contemplative persons of a certain fragility seek a permanent home, they come to Torquay and write stories like Christy’s Old Organ and Jessica’s First Prayer. At any rate, the remarkable little shilling book, Literary Landmarks of Torquay, by Mr. W. J. Roberts, discovers an amazing number of literary associations, with Charles Kingsley, P. H. Gosse, W. E. Norris, and Eden Phillpotts at their head, and a regiment of ladies bringing up the rear.

The seven hills—or more—on which Torquay is built are dotted plentifully with the largest and finest of these quiet villas, and the hollows in between are cut up into winding roads, where the stranger may speedily lose his bearings. If you consult a plan of Torquay, it will be perceived that the roads of its residential districts are like so many vermiculations, returning upon one another and intertwining almost with the intricacy of whorls in a Celtic design. It must have been far easier to find one’s way about the site of Torquay a century ago than now, and in many respects it was surely a more desirable place. From existing records one may form a very exact picture of it, say in 1815, when the long-dreaded “Boney,” for many years a figure of terror to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, was brought captive on the Bellerophon into Tor Bay, to be revealed to the gaping hundreds who put off in boats to see him, as merely a little fat man, clean-shaven, melancholy, and obviously unwell, mildly pacing the quarter-deck, and saying unexpectedly complimentary things about the scenery and the climate.

Its inhabitants then numbered about fifteen hundred, chiefly fishermen and the wives and families of naval officers, who, anchoring from time to time in the safe and roomy anchorage of Tor Bay, had first “discovered” the place. It was then still little more than that Quay at the foot of the hills (or “Tors”) it had been when William of Orange landed at Brixham, in 1688; and the fine old residence of Tor Abbey, seat then as now of the Carys, was the only considerable place in the neighbourhood. The hill-tops were yet in a state of nature, except the crest of Chapel Hill, where the little chapel of St. Michael formed a notable landmark for sailors. This was, according to legend, the offering of some ancient mariner, and displayed a beacon-light at night, to guide shipping safely into the bay. The ancient chapel, one of the smallest in England, measuring only thirty-six feet in length, remains to this day, two hundred and seventy feet above the sea, at the modern suburb of Torre, and is part of the borough meteorological station.