The only tragedy of the affair was the suicide of Birch, who, afraid of his part, hanged himself some few days after the capture. This affair deeply impressed the country-folk. Wichehalse was thought never after to have prospered, and it was told how John Babb was thenceforward a man accurst. He left his master’s service and went into the herring-fishery; whereupon the herrings deserted Lynmouth. He died unhonoured, and his granddaughter, Ursula Babb, was afflicted with the evil eye. She married and had one son, who was drowned at sea; and thenceforward lived lonely at Lynmouth, half-crazed; telling old stories of the departed grandeur of the Wichehalses which grew more and more marvellous and confused with every repetition. It was she who told the Reverend Matthew Mundy the legends, which he took down and first printed--with many embellishments of his own--of Jennifrid’s Leap. There was never (let it be repeated) a Jennifrid Wichehalse. The feckless John Wichehalse, who ruined the family, had three sons and one daughter. The sons died without issue; the last vestiges of the family wealth being dissipated in their time by the effectual means of a Chancery suit. Mary, the daughter, married at Caerleon one Henry Tompkins, and had one son, Chichester Tompkins. She returned, in a half-demented condition, to Lynmouth, and was used to wander along the cliffs, the scene of her ancestors’ former prosperity, accompanied by one old retainer, Mary Ellis. At last Mary Tompkins fell over a steep rock into the sea, her body never being recovered; and so ended the last Wichehalse. To-day, in spite of those large families of the various Wichehalse branches, you shall not find one of that name remaining in Devonshire. To-day the Newnes’ interest dominates Lynton. I shall draw no satirical picture of what has been made possible by the Elementary Education Act of 1869 and _Tit-Bits_. Such an alliance carries a man into unexpected horizons, but with so many Richmonds now crowding the field, the thing will not be so easily repeated. On the crest of Holiday Hill stands the residence of Sir George Newnes, Bart., and in the town the Town Hall he gave is a prominent object: picturesqueness itself, in its combined Gothic and Jacobean architectural styles, and contrasted masonry and magpie timber and plaster. There is always, in the summer, a cheerful stir in Lynton, and the railway has by no means abolished the four-horsed coach that plies between Ilfracombe and this point, and even on to Minehead. But when the close of the season has come and the holiday world has gone home, what then? The hotel-keepers and all the ministrants to the crowds of visitors must surely, to protect themselves from sheer ennui, institute a kind of desperate “general post,” and go and stay with each other, on excessive terms, to keep their hands in, so to say. CHAPTER IV THE COAST, TO COUNTISBURY AND GLENTHORNE