one regards them with different eyes. When you get to the mouth of a river, for instance, you no longer look for thatched cottages or half-timbered houses or Tudor homesteads. You expect hard-featured, storm-smitten tenements of stone, and seek the picturesque with probable success in narrow tortuous streets, in steep stairway wynds, in low-browed taverns soaked in mariners' tales. We have nothing to do with these things here. It may be said that rivers whose storm-sheltered mouths are so intimately concerned with sea-going have much to do with them. But it is not with that side of a river's influence at any rate which in the main this book aspires to deal. Between the Dart and Plymouth, or, to be more precise, between the Dart and that beautiful little stream, the Erme, a glimpse of which adorns these pages: between Dartmoor again on the north and the sea to the south, lies that block of Devon known as the South Hams. As I have said, it is not precisely a part of the county which a patriotic Devonian, not obsessed by his patriotism, would select for taking, let us say, a Herefordshire friend up on to a high place and asking his opinion of Devonshire. But furrowing its way southward from Dartmoor to the sea, hidden from the eye till you are right down beside it, runs one of the most entrancing little rivers in Devonshire. Larger and longer than the Erme, which at Ivybridge has some outside notoriety, the Avon is quite as beautiful, with the advantage of comparative obscurity. This is an inversion, too, of what one might look for, since from South Brent Junction on the Great Western main line, where the Avon breaks from the fringes of the moor, a little railway follows down its woody mazes, hugging it closely for most of its journey to the sea, and culminating at Kingsbridge, whence travellers go by road or water to [Illustration: THE ERME, IVY BRIDGE, DEVON] [Illustration] Salcombe, another harbour on the Dartmouth pattern, but even more beautiful.