In talking to a man who had been taken seriously ill, I asked him how the attack came on; and he told me how. “The pain took me that sudden round the middle, that I thought I’d parted right asunder. But it didn’t so happen to be.” There was nothing of the wasp about him to suggest the likelihood of such a severance. An old man, who lived some way from here, was refusing his consent to a thing that could have been done equally well without his consent, though at much greater cost; and I went over to talk to him about it. He did not know me, and resented my intrusion; but presently he asked:--“Be you a son of Mr Torr as were a friend of Mr *****?” I said I was; and in a moment he was genial, slapped me on the back, and said:--“Why, one day they two pretty near drownded I.” He was going along a clam--a bridge formed of a single tree-trunk thrown across a stream--and they gave the trunk a twist, when he was half way over. The recollection of it put him into such good humour that he promised his consent. I once told this to a friend, while I was going along a clam myself; and the notion struck him that he might perhaps give his children a claim upon my gratitude, if he just rolled me off. There is little danger of drowning in these streams, as they generally are shallow. But accidents have happened. On the night of 27 December 1863 a man was going to Rudge from Wreyland by the clam across the Wrey; and he fell in, struck his head against a rock, and lay there stunned till he was drowned. His body was found next morning. Just between Wreyland and Lustleigh the Wrey is very narrow; and I was able to rebuild the bridge there in the primæval way. The timber was decaying, and there were doubts about the liability for repair: so I assumed the office of Pontifex. I got blocks of granite nearly twelve feet long, and weighing nearly two tons each, and just placed them across the stream. As the whole rainfall of the valley has to pass through the little gap between Wreyland and Lustleigh, there naturally are floods here after very heavy rains or thaws; and then it is not easy to go from one place to the other. Writing to my father on 26 December 1847 about a flood at that time, my grandfather recalls an incident in a much worse flood eight years before:--“Sally ***** could not come over the meadows, and went round Bishop’s Stone, and there found it equally bad: so her son-in-law Dick ***** took her to his back. But she being so heavy--double Dick’s weight--Dick was obliged to put her down in the middle of it.” One afternoon a Church Lads’ Brigade came over from a seaside place to see the Cleave and other sights, and they had their tea in these meadows by the Wrey. The weather being warm, they all went for the stream, and bathed with a publicity that was hitherto unknown here, though not uncommon at the seaside. One of our oldest inhabitants was aghast at it, and said to me:--“Well, Mr Torr, if this be Wreyland, us might live in savage parts.”