But let us have a few specimen days from Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary, to taste her quality. March 1798, for example, will serve: “28th.—Hung out the linen.” “29th.—Coleridge dined with us.” “30th.—Walked I know not where.” “31st.—Walked.” And then “April 1st. Walked by moonlight.” What utter drivel and self-confessed inanity; exasperating in its baldness, when an account of what Coleridge said on the occasion of his driving with them would have given us reading the world would now probably be glad enough to possess! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XV STEART—STOGURSEY—THE FOLK-SPEECH OF ZUMMERZET—GLATT-HUNTING AT KILVE—ST. AUDRIES TO touch the coast on the left-hand of the Parret estuary is to adventure into a little-visited land. But although the way is long—the distance is six miles to Steart Point—the road is sufficiently easy, being downhill from Cannington to Cannington Park, scene of the battle of Cynuit, and to Otterhampton; and then flat for the remaining four miles. At Otterhampton, a village of a few farms and cottages, the church contains a memorial to a former rector, the Rev. Dr. Jeffery, who held the living for no fewer than sixty-seven years, from 1804 to 1871. The river bends abruptly and nears the road at a point a mile and a half out, where the little waterside hamlet of Combwich—“Cummidge,” as it is styled locally—stands looking on to muddy creeks and the broad grey bosom of the Parret itself, with a colour like that of a London fog. Bridgwater spire is plainly visible, far off to the right, across the levels: sailing barges are loading the bricks made here from the kilns close at hand, and carts rattle and rumble along the few narrow alleys that form the only streets of the place. Away across the river, a whitewashed house marks the position of a little-used ferry from the out-of-the-world district of Pawlett Hams to this even more outlandish peninsula of Steart. Steart Point thrusts out a long tongue of land over against Burnham, whose houses and tall white lighthouse seem so near across the levels, yet are almost two miles distant, over the rivermouth and the mud-flats. The name of “Steart” has come down to us little altered from Anglo-Saxon times, an “a” replacing the “o” with which it appears to have originally been spelled. It is the same name as that of the Start in South Devon, and signifies a boldly projecting neck of land, “starting” out to sea. Otherwise there is no likeness between that Devonian promontory of cruel, black jagged rocks and this flat, muddy and shingly fillet of land.