Other and much more interesting relics than those empty embrasures upon the sky-line are found in the eight Armada guns that lie in a row outside the Technical School, on the quay and in the neighbourhood of the Kingsley statue. Or, at any rate, they are reputed to be Armada guns; which, with the sure fact that they are foreign, and the probability of their being Spanish, is as far as their story is likely to be told. In these parts they were so used to bring home captured ships, and to litter the quays with the spoils of other people, that the thing became commonplace and not worth recording at the time. And by that later time, when the story of the relics got beyond recording, and no one really knew anything at all about them, they were all at once found to be curious and interesting--with the key to their story lost. They were then buried half their length in the quay and served the commonplace, if useful, purpose of posts, from which they have now been rescued. Long and slender, with long sloping shoulders, something in shape like exaggerated hock-bottles, they certainly resemble the indubitable Armada guns found on the wrecked ship at Tobermory in recent years. Nor are these all existing in the neighbourhood. There is one, astonishingly encrusted with long lying in the sea, thrown carelessly aside, opposite the Royal Hotel, Westward Ho!; two that formerly stood as posts on Instow quay are now at Tapeley Park, three are at Portledge, three others on the quay at Clovelly, and it is currently reported that several have been seen on the sea-bottom off Westward Ho! at exceptionally low tides. Bideford Quay, that figures in circumstances of considerable stress in the great romance by Kingsley, is a very different place from the quay of Elizabethan days. A broad roadway runs now, where water and mudbanks once stood. Kingsley himself would scarce recognise it. Paradoxically enough, all these works and improvements have been undertaken since the commerce of the town has declined. There is no fierce energy at Bideford to-day, and such shipping as there remains is very casual. Some few old houses--older than they look from without, remain by quayside; in especial, the “Three Tuns” inn, with a seventeenth-century plaster mantelpiece in an upstairs room, with figures in the costume of the time, clinging uncouthly to Renaissance ornament. [Illustration: BIDEFORD QUAY.]