It is a fine breezy walk, but rough and tiring, from here to Burton Bradstock, along the coast--eight miles of a ribbon-like path, that winds along the landward side of the Chesil Beach. By the time we reached that village we had had more than enough of it, and crossed the little river Bredy into the highroad. At the end of another mile and a half that road runs steeply down into West Bay, the port and harbour of Bridport, a desolate place of infinite sand, where the sea comes banging in furiously upon the wooden jetties at the harbour mouth. Up the marshy valley can just be seen the roof-tops of Bridport, and at the back of them hills, with hills again to right and left. Indeed, this is a stretch of country calculated to make sad within him the heart of the cyclist, for hills abound, and however fair the country-side may be to an unprejudiced observer, ’tis little short of a wonder when a land of hills and dales is other than a howling wilderness to the perspiring wheelman, bent over his handles in an agony of pedalling. Such an one we met fighting against the inevitable when last we journeyed this way. The inevitable, it should be said in this connection, resolved itself into a dismount, and a moist and gasping halt by the dusty hedgerow. Well, we left the poor soul, and encumbered only with our knapsacks, breasted the steep down that forms a short cut to Chideock. Here cycles may not go by any manner of means. The village of Chideock lay in a valley at some distance, a village of the kind that lines the highroad, with one long street, rising from the hollow, half-way to the brow of the succeeding hill. All around lay the huge hills of this hilly land, with Golden Cap, truncated, like another Table Mountain, seaward. XXVI. Chideock was named from a once powerful family that bore this singular name, but now long since extinct. They had their castle here, of which no sign now remains, saving only in the name of the Chideock Castle Inn, where we stayed the night. It was a night close and intolerably warm, and I could not sleep. All through the night and the earliest morning hours the place within and the countryside without were quiet to a degree. Only once was the stillness of the country road broken--toward the stroke of one--by the old clock on the stairway. Then some one who rode horseback went past at a trot, and the clatter of hoofs rang out clearly in the stillness of the air for some minutes. I lay and wondered whom he could be who was called abroad at this hour, and so, weaving little romances around that unconscious rider, presently fell asleep.