The fisher village of Steart is a singular place: a fishing village without boats! The shrimps, eels and flounders usually caught here are taken in nets set by the men of Steart going down to the sea at low water on “mud-horses.” Everything is conditioned here by the deep mud of the foreshore, which may only be crossed by special appliances, evolved locally. Chief among these is the “mud-horse,” which, it may at once be guessed, is no zoological freak. If it is related to anything else on earth, it may perhaps be set down as a hybrid production: a cross between a towel-horse and a toboggan sledge. When the fishermen of Steart prepare to go forth a-fishing, they proceed to undress themselves to the extent of taking off their trousers and putting on a cut-down pair, very little larger than bathing-drawers. Mud-boots clothe their feet. Then they bring down their wooden “horses,” and, leaning against the upright breast-high framework, give a vigorous push, and so go slithering along the buttery surface of the flats; the nearest approach to that fabulous body of cavalry, the “Horse Marines,” any one is ever likely to see: There was an old fellow of Steart, Who went catching eels in the dirt. When they asked “Any luck?”— “Up to eyes in the muck!” Said that rueful old fellow of Steart. The traveller has to pass the little church and scattered cottages of Otterhampton on the way to Steart; and on the return, if he wishes to keep near the coast, he comes through Stockland Bristol, a pretty rustic village, with prosperous-looking manor-house and an entirely modern church. Beyond it are Upper Cock and Lower Cock farms, that take their names from a tumulus down in the levels near the estuary known as “Ubberlowe.” “Upper Cock,” in its original form, was “Hubba Cock”; “Cock” signifying a heap, and comparing with “haycock.” “Ubbalowe” is properly “Hubbalowe,” _i.e._ “Hubba’s heap,” both names pointing to the probability that here was buried the chieftain Hubba, who, as we have already seen, fell at Cynuit. From this point a succession of winding lanes leads down again to the curving shore of Bridgwater Bay at Stolford. Here meadows, a farmstead with well-filled rickyards, and a compound heavily walled and buttressed against flooding from the salt marshes, border upon a raised beach of very large blue-grey stones, which replaces the mud that gathers round the Parret estuary. Here at low spring tides traces may yet be found of the submarine forest off-shore. A sample of the foreshore taken at Stolford usually suffices explorers, and fully satisfies their curiosity; for the clattering loose stones of the heaped-up beach form an extremely tiring exercise-ground. [Illustration: THE “MUD HORSE.”]