The main road passes at intervals, Fairy Cross, Horns Cross, and the Hoops Inn, and presently comes to Buck’s Cross; where one of many signposts continues a long series of pointing arms to “Woolsery.” I have successfully resisted that repeated invitation inland, and do not know what Woolsery is like: only this, that the village of Woolfardisworthy is indicated. But even in North Devon, where time goes something slowly, life is not long enough to always pronounce the word as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of no signpost is long enough to contain the whole of it; and so the district has cast away, like so much useless lumber, half its length. Down on the right hand goes the road, staggeringly steep, to Buck’s Mill, a little cranny in the towering wooded cliffs, where a huge limekiln and a few white cottages hang crazily over the water. Turner has made a pretty picture of “Bucks,” as it is called for short--or more properly, “Bucksh”--with a distant glimpse of the houses of Clovelly, pouring like a cataract down the face of the cliffs, and a still more distant peep of Lundy. The old, old tale of the original inhabitants of Buck’s Mill having been wrecked Spaniards is still told. You hear that story of many seaside hamlets in the West; but I, for one, fail to see the swarthiness, the obvious foreign origin, of the present men, women, and children of Bucks, so dwelt upon in guide-books. [Illustration: CLOVELLY, FROM BUCK’S MILL. [_After J. M. W. Turner, RA_ ] When I found myself down at the bottom of that profound descent and at Buck’s Mill, it began to rain: the hopeless dogged rain that comes down out of a leaden sky, deliberately, as though it were determined to rain all night. I sat in a leaky shed on a heap of sand and waited.... Still waiting! Some one has written, somewhere, that ignorance is the parent of wonder, and all this while I had been wondering many things--wondering if it were going to rain all night; wondering if it were not better to push on to Clovelly; wondering if one would get very wet if a start were made now; wondering why it should be a law of Nature that hopeless rain should set in when one was in an exposed situation and with a considerable distance yet to go.... Better chance it. And so, pushing the bicycle up that long, steep ascent, which in descending had seemed only a quarter the length, I slithered through a sea of mud along the lonely road and in a dense white fog. It had ceased raining, on the way, but the fog exuded almost as much moisture. And so, cautiously, from Clovelly Cross down to the Court and the head of that precipitous staircase called Clovelly “street.” The promised lingering approach, as the sun went down by the famed Hobby Drive, had to be abandoned for the while, and reserved for a more favourable day. CHAPTER XV CLOVELLY--“UP ALONG” AND “DOWN ALONG”--THE “NEW INN”--APPRECIATIVE AMERICANS--THE QUAY POOL--THE HERRING FISHERY