There is one fine old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ at Axminster, with huge rambling stables and interminable corridors, in which one ought to meet the ghosts of departed travellers on the Exeter Road. But they are shy. There should, in fact, be many ghosts in this old town of many memories; and so there are, to that clairvoyant optic, the ‘mind’s eye.’ But they refuse to materialise to the physical organ, and it is only to a vivid imagination that the streets are repeopled with the excited peasantry who, in that fatal summer of 1685, flocked to the standard of the Duke of Monmouth, whom ‘the Lord raised vp’ as the still existing manuscript narrative of an Axminster dissenting minister says, to champion the Protestant religion--with what results we already know. Pleasant meadow-lands lead by flat and shaded roads from Axminster by the river Axe to Axmouth, Seaton, and the sea, but our way continues inland. XLII There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles and a half between Axminster, the byegone home of carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of the lace industry, where all routes from London to Exeter meet. ‘Honiton lace’ is made now in the surrounding villages, but not in the town itself. The first hill is soon met with, on passing over the river Yart. This is Shute Hill, where the coaches generally were upset, if either the coachman or the horses were at all ‘fresh.’ Then it is a long run down to Kilmington, where the travellers, having recovered their hearts from their boots or their throats, according to their temperaments, and found their breath, promptly cursed those coachmen and threatened them with all manner of pains and penalties for reckless driving. Thence, by way of Wilmington, to Honiton. A quarter of a mile before reaching that town the traveller comes upon a singular debased Gothic toll-house. If he walks or cycles he may pass freely, but all carts and cattle have still to pay toll. This queer survival is known as King’s Road Gate, or by the more popular name of ‘Copper Castle,’ from its once having a peaked copper roof above its carpenter-gothic battlements. [Illustration: ‘COPPER CASTLE.’] [Sidenote: _THE LAST COACH_] Honiton, whose name is locally ‘Honeyton,’ is a singularly uninteresting town, with its mother-parish church half a mile away from the one broad street that forms practically the whole of the place. Clean, quiet, and neither very old nor very new, so far as outward appearance goes, Honiton must be of a positively deadly dulness to the tourist on a rainy day; when to go out of doors is to get wet, and to remain in, thrown on the slender resources for amusement afforded by the local papers and the ten-years-old county directory in the hotel coffee-room, is a weariness.