There is no _town_ at Saunton, and the mere fringe of houses beside the road is very new; this coast having been of old too dreary and inhospitable to afford a home for honest folk. Smugglers, wreckers, and such shy cattle, were among its scanty frequenters, and sometimes (the place being so lonely and secretive) refugees landed amid these wastes. Among them was the Duke of Ripperda, who landed one dark night in the beginning of October 1728, out of an Irish barque. He “had no one with him but the lady who had procured his deliverance, the corporal of the guard, and one servant.” This fugitive had escaped from the castle of Segovia. He was entertained the night by one “Mr. Harris of Pickwell,” and then went to Exeter. Thus the Duke of Ripperda, who is no national concern of ours, flits mysteriously across country to disappear again in foreign parts. It would puzzle a biographer to give him a domicile. Born a Dutchman, he seems to have been sent on a diplomatic mission to Madrid, and there to have renounced Holland and the Protestant religion and to have become a Spaniard and a Catholic. Philip the Fifth rewarded him with a dukedom. Eventually he is found in Morocco, as a Moorish subject of the deepest dye. At one period, we are told, he became a Jew, but that is scarcely credible. At last, having been everything it was possible to be, he died in 1737. [Illustration: SIR JOHN SCHORNE AND HIS DEVIL.] Old rotting ribs of wrecked ships, protruding like fangs from the wet margin of the sands, tell their own tale of unexpected and disastrous landfalls on the lonely shore. On the left hand of the road is still to be seen “Saunton Court,” an old farmhouse mentioned with glowing description in Blackmore’s “Maid of Sker,” but the interest of the house in the novel is not reflected in the present circumstances of the place.