Here a branch of the river Otter crosses the road in the wooded dell of Fenny Bridges, and in the course of another mile, on the banks of another stream, stands the ‘Fair Mile Inn,’ the last stage into [Sidenote: _EXETER_] [Illustration: ‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’] Exeter in coaching times. Lonely the road remains, passing the scattered cottages of Rockbeare, and the depressing outlying houses of Honiton Clyst, situated on the little river Clyst, with the first of the characteristic old red sandstone church-towers of the South Devon looking down upon the road from the midst of embowering foliage. Then the squalid east end of Exeter and the long street of Heavitree, where Exeter burnt her martyrs, come into view, and there, away in front, with its skyline of towers and spires, is Exeter, displayed in profile for the admiration of all who have journeyed these many miles to where she sits in regal grandeur upon her hill that descends until its feet are bathed in the waters of her godmother, the Exe. Her streets are steep and her site dignified, although it is partly the level range of the surrounding country, rather than an intrinsic height, which confers that look of majesty which all travellers have noticed. The ancient city rises impressive in contrast with the water-meadows, rather than by reason of actual measurement. Wayfarers approaching from any direction brace themselves and draw deep breaths preparatory to scaling the streets, which, at a distance, assume abrupt vistas. Villas, with spacious gardens, and snug, prebendal-looking houses, eloquent of a thousand a year and cellars full of old port, clothe the lower slopes of this rising ground, to give place, by degrees, to streets which, as the traveller advances, grow narrower and more crooked, their lines of houses becoming ever older, more picturesque, and loftier as they near the heart of the city. Modernity inhabits the environs, antiquity is seated, impressive, in the centre, where, on a plateau, closely hemmed in from the bustling, secular life of the streets, rises the sombre mass of the cathedral, the pride of this western land. XLIII Exeter is called by those who know her best and love her most the ‘Queen City of the West.’ To historians she is perhaps better epithetically remembranced as the ‘Ever Faithful,’ loyal and staunch through the good fortune or adversity of the causes for which she has, with closed and guarded gates, held fast the Key of the West. She has suffered much at different periods of her history for this loyalty; from the time when, declaring against the usurpation of Stephen, her citizens fought and starved within the walls; through the centuries to the time of Perkin Warbeck, the impostor, and so on to the Civil War between King and Parliament, when the citizens were more loyal than their rulers and were disarmed and kept under surveillance until the Royalists came and took the place, themselves to be dispossessed a few years later.