The first glimpse one has of Dartmouth when approaching it from the sea is the ancient castle of St Petrox standing opposite the ruins of its mate of long ago on the Kingswear side. Then one catches a vista--how charming whether in sunshine or when the mists of early morning hang grey-blue above the houses, and have yet to be dissipated by the sun’s rays--of the old town which lies almost hidden behind a green slope of land ending in a cliff. Past the ancient castle, built on the edge of the cliff and surrounded by the most delightful woods, where a picturesque old church seems as though almost about to fall into the water from its apparently perilous site on the very edge of the precipice, past villas nestling amid the trees, and rocky shores, past tiny coves, and slaty cliffs, bare except where trees, saplings, or ferns cling to make them beautiful, one comes at last on jade-coloured water, to the town, grey-looking and sheltered by high cliffs and downs behind it, built sheer up from the edge of the river itself. There, amid lofty hills on either side of the widening river or the arm of the sea (whichever one pleases to call it) lies what has been described as “the most beautiful and fascinating town in all Devon.” Prince, the famous vicar of Berry Pomeroy, whose book, so full of the Devonian spirit, if somewhat bombastic and ill-balanced in style, may yet be read with profit by those to whom the history of the past of “the fighting, glorious county of Devon,” has an interest, describes it thus, and the description save for a few minor details holds good to-day. Dartmouth, he says, is “a large and populous town, situated on the southern side of a very steep hill, which runneth east to west at considerable length of near a mile, whereby the houses as you pass on the water seem pensile (pendent), and hang along in rows like gallipots in an apothecary’s shop; so high and steep is it that you go from the lower to the higher parts thereof by stairs, and from the bottom to the top requires no less than a hundred.” Seen from the water near the _Britannia_ the old town is indeed charming, with the picturesquely irregular and weathered roofs of the older houses rising tier upon tier, and the grey-blue smoke of chimneys hanging like a perpetual and kindly veil softening crudities of architecture and adding pictorial charm. There are many quaint houses, more especially those built by Hayman about 1634-1640, in the Butterwalk, with the huge, pointed gables and overhanging upper stories wedded to modern fronted shops, in which are displayed “Paris fashions” and up-to-date goods that at first seem out of character with such surroundings. There is, indeed, much of interest for the artist and antiquarian in Dartmouth streets and by-ways, just as at almost every turn ashore and on the surface of the beautiful land-locked harbour there is something to arrest the attention of the casual observer.