England. Tewkesbury Abbey would alone be sufficient glory for any little town, but even without its abbey Tewkesbury would be very hard in its own style to find a match for anywhere. [Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF THE THAMES, KEW] [Illustration] CHAPTER VI THE RIVERS OF DEVON Devonshire is notoriously prolific in bold streams, a fact due to the presence of those two great areas of spongy moorland, Dartmoor and Exmoor, which lie in whole or part within her borders. Next to her splendid sea-coast, both north and south, the streams of Devon and the deep valleys they have cut are her chief glory. The actual moorland--Dartmoor, for instance, Exmoor being largely in Somerset--owes its celebrity in a great measure to the unexpected nature of its situation: a patch of South Wales or Yorkshire dropped, as it were, into the heart of a warm southern county. The uplands of the moor, save for a scantier supply of heather, are practically identical in appearance with hundreds of square miles in South and Mid Wales, or the northern counties of England, that have no notoriety at all outside their own districts. The same indeed may be said for the beautiful Devonshire streams. They are merely the streams of the North and of Wales disporting themselves in an unexpected quarter. Or, to put it more lucidly, the contrast between the soft low-pitched, bridled landscape, with its gentle streams of the neighbouring southern counties and the moors of Devonshire, with the impetuous rivers that they send spouting through the humpy low country, upsets the equilibrium of people not widely acquainted with their native land, and gives rise to a good deal of ill-instructed gush. Again and again in fiction, on the stage, or in fugitive articles, you find the Devonshire village glibly quoted as the ideal of English rustic architecture and bowery cosiness. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Cornwall, Devonshire stands easily last in this respect of all the southern and west midland counties, including the rural counties of South Wales. The wanderer by Devon streams other than those on the Dorsetshire side of the county must not expect, save in a few favoured districts, to find the picturesque villages that will confront him everywhere on the chalk streams, or by the slow rivers of Warwickshire, Gloucester, or Worcester, or the livelier brooks of Shropshire, Hereford, and [Illustration: THE HAMOAZE, DEVONPORT, FROM MOUNT EDGCUMBE] [Illustration]