‘Seeing is believing, Claude: through laughter, and failures, and the stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she persevered in her silk-growing, and succeeded; and I should like to put her book into the hands of every squire in Devon, Cornwall, and the South of Ireland.’ ‘Or require them to pass an examination in it, as one more among the many books which I intend, in my ideal kingdom, all landlords to read and digest, before they are allowed to take possession of their estates. In the meantime, what is that noble conical hill, which has increased my wonder at the infinite variety of beauty which The Spirit can produce by combinations so simple as a few grey stones and a sheet of turf?’ ‘The Hangman.’ ‘An ominous name. What is its history?’ ‘Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with his booty slung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor brute’s struggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on one side of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and the ravens—You may fill up the picture for yourself.’ But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change of scene—the square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours. There shines among the woods the Castle of Watermouth, on its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbour on the coast; and there is Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, which seven centuries of fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (now deservedly lost) of ‘sending a talker to the national palaver,’ have neither cleansed nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dear Claude, lest even at this distance some foul odour taint the summer airs, and complete the misfortune already presaged by that pale, sad face, sickening in the burning calm! For this great sun-roasted fire-brick of the Exmoor range is fairly burning up the breeze, and we have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe.