However, as this horrified traveller was fain to acknowledge, even although these things had come to pass and though the once old-fashioned hotel had been changed into “a huge, staring structure, assailing the eye at every turn”--he meant the Valley of Rocks Hotel--“it will take a long time to spoil Lynton utterly.” Very much more has been done to Lynton since then, and building has gone on uninterruptedly. The narrow-gauge Lynton and Barnstaple Railway--the “Toy Railway,” as it is often called, from its rather less than two-foot gauge--opened in 1898, has been a disappointing enterprise for its shareholders, but has brought much expansion. Probably it would have been a better speculation had its Lynton terminus been in the town, rather than hidden on the almost inaccessible heights of “Mount Sinai,” another climb of about two hundred feet. The service is so infrequent and the pace so slow that, coupled with the initial difficulty of finding it at all, the traveller can perform a good deal of his journey by road to any place along the route, before the train starts. And an energetic cyclist can, any day, make a very creditable race with it. [Illustration: LYNTON.] Lynton has now become no inconsiderable town, very bustling and cheerful in summer: its narrow street quite built in with the tall “Valley of Rocks Hotel” aforesaid, and a large number of shops and business premises not in the least rural. Between them, they contrive to make the old parish church look singularly out of place. That is just the irony of it! The interloping, hulking buildings themselves are alien from the spirit of the neighbourhood, but they have contrived to impress most people the other way. “How odd,” unthinking strangers exclaim, as they see a rustic church and grassy, tree-shaded churchyard amid the bricks and mortar; not pausing to consider that the church has been here hundreds of years, and few of the buildings around more than twenty. But there is little really ancient remaining of the church, for it was rebuilt, with the exception of the tower, in 1741, and has been added to and altered at different times since then. Quite recently it has again, to all intents, been rebuilt, and fitted and furnished most artistically, in the newer school of ecclesiastical decoration. Those who are sick at heart with the stereotyped patterns of the usual ecclesiastical furnisher, with his stock designs in lecterns and anæmic stained-glass saints, his encaustic tiles with an eternity of repetitive geometrical patterns, and indeed everything that is his, will welcome the something individual that here, and in some few other favoured places, may be found to redress the dreary monotony.