A small shipping trade, and a fairly commodious harbour to accommodate it, together with quays and queer waterside inns and storehouses and a custom-house, are livelier attributes of the town. Also, there are sail-lofts and seafaring smells, and a shipbuilding yard, where I remember, years ago, to have seen a vessel built. Boats there are, and a yacht or two anchored out in the channel, a cluster of ships buoyed out in deep water, and at ebb tide, two or three big vessels heeled over in the ooze. There is a very nautical flavour, figurative and realistic, about the harbour, and an ancient and fish-like smell about the jetty where the fisher-boats land their catches. Hereabouts, in the sunshine, sit rows of amphibious loungers, who smoke, chew tobacco, and curse the livelong day--such of them as have not been converted at the Gospel Hall yonder. Up the river, beyond the harbour and the clustering masts, is the bridge. A remarkable bridge this, built of wood in the first years of the present century, with thirty-four arches, and (to descend to the particularity of the guide-book) a total length of 1670 feet. Shaldon is reached by it, and the Torquay road. The ferry-boats from the harbour take passengers across for the same toll of a penny either way. We went across by boat, and instead of taking the highroad for Torquay, climbed round under the Ness, among the fallen rocks and seaweed-slippery boulders by the sea. XXXVII. I knew an artist once who climbed round by these jagged rocks, and slipped down between two of them and sprained his ankle, just as they do in the penny novelettes. But there the resemblance ceased. The artists in the novelettes are always handsome and of a god-like grace, and they wear moustaches of a delightfully silken texture, and velveteen coats, and talk pretty, like nothing or no one ever _did_ talk. This fellow, to the contrary, was as ugly a beggar as one might meet in a long day’s march, and he was as awkward as a duck out of water, and instead of a velveteen coat he wore a blazer of the most inartistic and thrilling combinations of coloured stripes. He said velveteen coats were all “bally rot,” which shows how vulgar he could be on occasion. No artist in the novelettes ever said “bally rot,” I’m sure. Also, he smoked tobacco of the rankest and most objectionable kind, and he never wore a moustache at all, and shaved only once a week, so that no self-respecting girl was ever known to allow herself to be kissed by him more than once. I can’t understand how all this could be: it doesn’t resemble the novelettes one little bit. But this artist was like the artists in the tales in one particular; he painted superlatively, as thoroughly, indeed, as he swore and drank, and that is saying a great deal.