“No matter,” said he, “brushes are so jolly scarce down here that I’d take this chance if it were a hearth-brush.” Salcombe streets are of the most break-neck character: full of tragic possibilities and large stones. Only Fore Street is approximately level, and in Fore Street are the shops. Such shops! We looked into one window, about three feet square, and made a mental inventory of its contents:--Six Spanish onions; a plateful of wooden dolls, leering with vacuous glances at a tin of sardines; four tin money-boxes; three plates of apples (incarnate stomach-aches); a cake of blacking; two cakes of soap (whose name wild horses shall not drag from me); five peg-tops; one plum cake; and, casting a greasy light over all, a tallow dip in a brass candlestick. Other shops there were which rejoiced in large frontages and wide expanses of window, and, displayed in those windows, were goods disposed at rare and rhythmic intervals, so that one had not the heart to destroy their symmetry by making purchases. Salcombe is a port of great possibilities. Were it not so near a neighbour of Plymouth Sound, that haven _par excellence_, it had been, one may surmise, a well-frequented harbour, with a town rivalling Dartmouth. For here is safe anchorage for ships of deepest draught, and sea-room in plenty within the gullet formed between precipitous cliffs. Even yet, Salcombe may become a harbour where masts will cluster thickly. True, the channel is beset with rocks, but what do rocks avail against dynamite? Now it is seldom visited save by pleasure yachts and stray coasting-vessels, with the Kingsbridge Packet calling periodically at its quay _en route_ to or from Plymouth. Salcombe village has grown into a small town of quiet residents, and equally quiet holiday-makers, and possibly in the near future the Kingsbridge Railway, now building, may push on these few miles further, bringing to the solitary coast scenery of the Bolt Head--the grandest in Devon--a crowd of tourists, with the inevitable consequences.