Morthoe (locally “Morte”) village is a wan, desolate-looking collection of a few houses on the cliff-top, overlooking the wide expanse of blue sea and yellow sands of Woolacombe Bay. It can never have worn anything but a stern, stark, weather-beaten appearance, but that is giving way in these times to something even less attractive; commonplace plaster-fronted houses, that would not pass muster in even one of the less desirable London suburbs, having sprung up around the ancient weatherworn church, while a grocer’s shop, styling itself “stores,” looks on to the churchyard. At a place named so tragically “Morthoe,” you do most ardently demand that the scene be set somewhat in accordance with the ominous name. The stranger does not insist upon a mortuary full of shipwrecked sailors, as (so to say) a guarantee of good faith, but he does resent, most emphatically, the sheer commonplace that dashes his anticipations remorselessly to extinction. The ancient family of Tracy, associated closely with Barnstaple, and with many another locality in North and Mid Devon, are mentioned in histories of the neighbourhood as early as the beginning of the twelfth century. Ever after the murder of Thomas à Becket in 1170, in which William de Tracy bore a part, the Tracys were said, in the wild legends of old, to have always “the wind in their faces.” The belief provided a rough rhyme, and satisfied a queer idea of retributive justice by which root and branch alike of that unfortunate family suffered for the acts of one who it appears was not himself, after all, of that race: having been a de Sudeley by birth, and only assuming the name of Tracy after his marriage with Grace, daughter of Sir William de Tracy. The legends that have gathered like the incrustation on old port-wine bottles, round the assassination of Becket and the after-history of the four knights who murdered him, tell how Tracy fled to Morthoe and passed the rest of his life in prayers and penitence, but it seems to be fully established that he fled the country and died three years later, in Calabria; after having, according to a yet further variant, thrice unsuccessfully attempted to make pious pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and being beaten back on every occasion by adverse winds. [Illustration: MORTHOE.]