The coast here is serrated with tiny bays, from which run valleys, called in Devonshire “coombes,” or “combes,” variously. Of these, Watcombe is perhaps best known. Sometimes the combe has become a town, as at Babbacombe.

Maidencombe is one of the smallest and prettiest of those deep and narrow valleys, clothed with a rich vegetation, and thickly wooded with giant elms, retired, and, what Devonshire folk call “loo,” or “lew,” that is, sheltered. There is, indeed, a secluded parish in Devon to whose name this commendatory adjective is prefixed—Lew Trenchard, to wit—noteworthy also as being the home of that strenuous author, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould. On the other hand, there is yet another Lew in Devon—North Lew—in the northern part of the county, a wild, stormy, bleak, misbegotten place, whose name was probably conferred in derision by some deluded inhabitant; it is the place where, according to the local saying, the devil died of the cold!

Watcombe we passed, with its towering red rocks rising sheer out of the coombe; and, after toiling up hill and down dale, arrived at Babbacombe, a fairy settlement of villas adjoining Torquay’s suburb of Marychurch. Red sandstone rocks give place to lofty limestone cliffs, clothed in luxuriant foliage, and skirted about their base with beaches of rounded limestone pebbles of every size, smoothed and polished by constant friction of the water.

We took tea at the Carey Arms, upon the lawn that gives on the water; and admired, with the fleeting tourist’s regretful admiration, those blood-red and milk-white cliffs, and that foreshore of the whitest, hugest, and hardest marbles, and that sea of the most bewitching and impossible light-blue—impossible, that is to say, from the point of view of he or she who would transfer it to canvas—and bewildered brush-wielders are here the commonest objects of the seashore. Not the least of the things for which Torquay and Babbacombe are responsible are the wasting of good paint and the spoiling of many acres of fair primed canvas.

Beauty, you see, of any sort, is never harmless.

Leaving Babbacombe, we turned aside to visit Anstey’s Cove, that deep pool, guarded by ghostly pinnacles of rocks, and overhung with silver birch and brambles. Who was Anstey, and why was this cave named after him? Who, again (forgive the digression), was Tooks, and why was a court in Holborn made ridiculous with his name? We can only fold our hands, and say in either case, “We don’t know.” Anstey’s Cove is a favourite bathing-place, and has at its entrance from the road a famous sign. The sign has been here for years, and is become quite a time-honoured institution. The original “Thomas,” I fear, is long since gathered to his fathers.

Excellent and most moral Thomas! Mindful both of provisions and the proprieties, your truly British characteristics shall excuse your errors of rhyme and rhythm; and though your lines don’t scan, I trust your actions lÀ bas have attained a ready scansion lÀ haut.

And now Torquay is near, happily situated on a down grade, for which praise be. But let us be duly reverent, for Torbay, shining yonder in the afternoon sun, is the gate by which entered, “for our goods,” as Fraulein Kilmansegg innocently observed, the Hanoverian dynasty, to save a nation which could not save itself.