“_Piano_” do they call the things? I wish they were so, really. “_Fortissimo_,” their torture rings-- I’d like to smash ’em, dearly. _Tommaso_ from Bologna hails; _Paolo_ from Napoli; Their organ, with its trills and wails, Proceeds from place unholy. “Would the signori lika ze musique?” and, suiting the action to the word, the chief brigand gave the organ-handle a turn. Out leaped the initial bars of--yes, let it be named--“Ta-ra-ra Boom de Ay.” The signori would _not_ like any; please to go away. “What,” asked the Wreck, “is the Italian for ‘take your hook?’” But I didn’t know, and so, in default, to cut matters short, we took ours. There was no escaping the ubiquitous tune that was our “only wear” in matters musical last year. The very trains that rattled one down to the sounding sea pounded it out to the alert ear as they ran along the metals; the fly-man, who drove you at a crawling pace to your “digs.,” whistled it; and your landlady’s daughter (“a dear good girl, sir, an’ clever at ’er music, which she takes after me in, though I ses it as shouldn’t. Play the gentleman something, there’s a love”) thumped it out unmercifully. Seaside landladies, by the way, have always, by some strange dispensation of Providence, three things apparently inseparable from their race--a daughter, a piano, and a sea-view. The daughter plays on the piano, and the landlady harps upon the view--both musical, you see. Most, also, have “seen better days,” and as it usually rains when I visit those yellow sands, the statement admits of no dispute. XXXVIII. 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! [Illustration: MAIDENCOMBE.]