A silence that is not that of emptiness and desolation, but rather of restfulness and content, fills the lovely underwoods that clothe the hillsides of Culbone. “Sur-r-r-r,” sighs the summer breeze in the grey-green alders, the dwarf oaks, and slim ashes. It is like the peace of God. Deep down on the right—so deep that you do but occasionally hear the wash of the waves—is the dun-coloured Severn Sea, glimpsed more or less indistinctly through the massed stems. The path winds for a mile through these solitudes, mounting and descending steeply, and clothed in a few places with slippery pine-needles that render walking uphill almost impossible, and the corresponding descents something in the likeness of glissades. Culbone church is suddenly disclosed in an opening of the woods, standing on a little plateau amid the hills, with but two houses in sight, and those the cottages of what the country folk call “kippurs”: that is to say, keepers. St. Francis preached to the birds, and the casual visitor to Culbone is apt to think the vicar of Culbone’s only congregation must be the birds and beasts of this wild spot. But a visit paid on some summer Sunday would prove that, however few the parishioners, the visitors from Porlock, drawn by curiosity to take part in the service in what is supposed to be the “smallest church in England,” are many. The attendance is then, in fact, often more than the little building can accommodate, and service is frequently held in the churchyard. [Illustration: CULBONE CHURCH.] It is a singular little building thus suddenly disclosed to the stranger’s gaze: a white-walled structure of few architectural pretensions, but exhibiting examples of rude Early English and Perpendicular work. A shingled “extinguisher” spirelet rises direct from the west end of the roof: own brother (but a very infant brother) to the bulgeous, truncated spire of Porlock. The length of Culbone church is but thirty-three feet, and the breadth twelve feet, but it is quite complete within these limits. The nave roof, internally, is of the usual West of England “cradle” type, of Perpendicular date. It is, of course, an aisleless nave; but here will be found a tiny chancel and a chancel-screen, with a font to serve those rare occasions when a baptism takes place, and a family-pew for the Lovelace family on those rare occasions when the Earl is not earning an honest addition to his income by letting Ashley Combe. A few tombstones, with the usual false rhymes “wept,” “bereft,” are disposed about. On one of them you read the strange Christian name of “Ilott,” for a woman. By the south porch stands the base of a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century cross, stained with lichens.