The Great Hangman ends in Blackstone Point and beach; a savage spot, now absolutely solitary, but once the scene, together with the neighbouring cliffs, of busy mining operations. Combemartin, round the next bend of coast, was for centuries famed for its silver mines, and in a less degree for its lead, iron, and copper; and here also rich lodes were evidently discovered at some remote period, for the cliffs are honeycombed with tunnels and caves excavated in the pursuit of wealth. No road exists to these old excavations, and the rock and ore extracted must either have been shipped off by long-vanished stagings, or hoisted hundreds of feet above by ropes. One of these tunnels extends nearly 350 feet into the rock, and with a plentiful supply of matches it is possible to stumble along it to a great distance. But scrambling in these wilds, in a climate such as this of Devonshire, is an undertaking of the most exhausting kind, and not to be embarked upon by any except the agile or the robust. This explorer, at any rate, is not likely to forget the scramblings up and scramblings down involved, in company with showers of the loose stones that encumber the hillsides; nor the astonishment exhibited at West Challacombe Farm on beholding a stranger, stumbling upon the place by accident, on the way to Combemartin. There are remains in this old farmstead of a vanished importance, both in the thick walls carefully disposed and loopholed for defence, and in the old porch surmounted by a defaced coat of arms and the word “Pruz.” It is said to have been the manor-house of a family of that name, long ago extinct, or its identity lost in the debased form, “Prowse.” And so at last, steeply--always steeply up or down in these parts--down a typical Devonshire lane to Combemartin, meeting on the way a truly Devonian farm-labourer, who remarked of the sultry heat that it was, “Law bless ’ee proper St. Lawrence weather.” “St. Lawrence weather?” “Ees, fay; braave an’ hot, sure.” “But why St. Lawrence?” “Aw, then; daunt ’ee knaw? St. Lawrence wer’ king o’ th’ idlers, he wer’.” But why St. Lawrence should have that unenviable distinction is more than I can tell. There is, at any rate, an obvious connection between hot weather and the gridiron martyrdom of St. Lawrence. “Lazy as David Lawrence’s dog,” is said to be a Scottish phrase: the “Lawrence” in this instance being originally an imaginary “Larrence” who presided over the indolent. In Essex, on the other hand, your typical lazybones is “Hall’s dog”: _e.g._ “you’re like Hall’s dog, who was too lazy to bark.” CHAPTER VI COMBEMARTIN, AND ITS OLD SILVER MINES--THE CHURCH---WATERMOUTH CASTLE--HELE