It is all the same beside the sea to Kilve, and rough walking too; the rebuilt church of Kilton prominent inland, on the left; very modern, but with a relic of a century ago in the shape of a battered old barrel-organ with a set of mechanical psalm and hymn tunes, that used to be ground out every Sunday to the long-suffering congregation, who must, by dint of sheer damnable iteration, have come to loathe this unchanging psalmody with a peculiar hatred. We come now into the marches of West Somerset, where the folk-speech still to some extent remains; but the famous broad “Zummerzet” speech of these parts nowadays survives in its olden force only in the pages of dialect novels. The dialect novel is a thing of convention, like the dramatic stage, and is not necessarily a direct transcript from life. In novels of rural life, in rustic plays, and in illustrated jokes in which villagers appear, the countryman still wears a smock-frock and talks as his great-grandfather was accustomed to talk. Frequently, too, he wears a beaver hat, with a nap on it as luxuriant as the bristles of a boot-brush; and he is made to smoke “churchwarden” clay pipes about a yard long. Real rustics do not do these things nowadays. I only wish they did; for then exploring in the byways would be much more interesting. Nowadays, the unaccustomed Londoner can quite easily understand anything a Somersetshire man, even of the most rustic type, has to say. This, however, is not to be taken as an assertion that all the old characteristic words and phrases have died out, or that the accent is altogether a thing of the past. The Somerset speech is really part and parcel of that delightful West of England trick of the tongue which still grows gradually more noticeable to the stranger as he progresses westward. You will not notice this in any measure until you have passed an imaginary line, which may be drawn from Oxford in the north, to Southampton in the south, passing on the way such places as Wantage, Newbury, Andover, and Winchester. Westward of this frontier-line, the West of England, linguistically, commences. Somerset, by some unexplained accident, was notoriously the home of the broadest speech; but recent years have witnessed the singular phenomena (singular when taken in conjunction) of Somerset folk-speech losing much of its old-time character, and that of Devon, which had also largely fallen into disuse, returning in almost its olden strength.