The next morning, when the farmer’s men came down to the sands with their carts for the seaweed thrown up by the storm over night, they were astonished at beholding a face in the cliff’s overhead, and, standing out in the sea, crowned with screaming cormorants, and buffeted by the heavy waves, a tall pillar of rock which had not been there before. I take this moving story as a warning to parish clubs to be careful in the selection of their vicars. XXXVI. From here it is a two miles’ walk along the sea-wall into Teignmouth. Time and again, in winter storms, hundreds of feet of massive masonry have been torn down, and often carried away bodily, by the sea, and on two or three occasions great landslips have occurred from the soaring red-sandstone cliffs overlooking the railway. Railway engineering here is no play. “Teignmouth” (says my Bædeker) “is a large watering-place, prettily situated at the mouth of the Teign.” Thus far the guide-book. It is a peculiar feature of this class of literature that information is hurled at one’s head in stodgy lumps, in which are embedded measurements and statistics, enclosed in brackets sprinkled over the pages, like--like currants in a penny bun. Yet there are misguided folk who read guide-books continuously: these are people with an insatiable rage for general information, who spout dates at every turn. [Illustration: RAILWAY AND SEA-WALL, NIGHT.] [Illustration: From East Cliff, Teignmouth] But Teignmouth may well be termed a watering-place, if one may take the fact of its being partly surrounded by water as a valid claim to that obscure appellation, although I wot of places bearing it which are like unto the great Sahara for dryness. The town, which ranks next after Torquay in size, is continually growing, and climbing up the hillsides. They have built in every direction; the tunnels that were used to render its railway station even as the stations of the Metropolitan Railway for gloom have been opened out; the pier has burst into a dreadful variegated rash of advertisements, and the bathing-machines are blatant with the name of a certain Pill. But with the growth of the town, the local rates, say the ratepayers, with doleful intonation, keep pace, and the ambition of the local governing body accompanies the onward march, and tends to o’erleap itself in matters of public improvements. There is the market-house for the pointing of an example. I well remember the cavernous ramshackle old place that stood here years ago, a dim and dismal hole, where the blinking, owl-like stall-holders sold beans by the hundred and (so say the malicious) peas by the dozen. The Local Board pulled it down, which was, by itself, a well-advised action; but when there presently arose on its site another building devoted to the same purpose, wiseacres shook their heads and prophesied evil things.