Of the streams that have their springs elsewhere than in the moors, the Axe, which belongs more to Dorset and Somerset than to Devon, may, like the Sid, be passed over with bare mention. But the /Otter/ must not be dismissed so brusquely, for though it cannot vie with its moorland sisters in beauty of aspect, it has other claims to consideration. Rising in the hills that divide Devon from South Somerset, it presently passes Honiton, still famous for its lace, and a few miles further on flows by the knoll which is crowned by the massive towers of the fine church of Ottery St. Mary, the Clavering St. Mary of "Pendennis." It was here, in 1772, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most gifted scion of a gifted stock, was born. His father, vicar of the parish and headmaster of the Free Grammar School, and withal one of the most amiable and ingenuous of pedants, whose favourite method of edifying his rustic congregation was to quote from the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost," died when Samuel Taylor was in his ninth year; and the pensive child, who yet was not a child, was soon afterwards entered at Christ's Hospital. A frequent resort of his was a cave beside the Otter, known as "The Pixies' Parlour," where his initials may still be seen. Nor is this his only association with the stream. "I forget," he writes, "whether it was in my fifth or sixth year ... in consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week in October I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole night, a night of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and was there found at day-break, without the power of using my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank of the river." The experience may well have left its mark upon his sensitive nature, but it is clear that he carried with him from his native place a store of agreeable recollections of the stream, of whose "marge with willows grey" and "bedded sand" he afterwards wrote in affectionate strains. [Illustration: _Photo: Denney & Co., Exeter._ EXETER (_p. 31_).] * * * * *