When the south-westerly winds bring great seas raging into the bay, with towering white combers dashing in upon the sands, the Thurlestone finds a voice and calls with a sound of roaring, all over this countryside. The rustics say that at such times you shall hear the bellowing of the Thurlestone ten miles distant. For myself, I have come to Thurlestone at a time when there are no voices, save the cat-like screaming of the gulls and the horrible squawking noises of the cruiser setting out to sea from Hope Cove, and bidding a series of half-suffocated good-byes with her steam-whistles, dreadfully like some one being very offensively sick. Noises are not common on Thurlestone strand, and I would even say it was lonely, save that the millions of sand-fleas inhabiting the shore forbid the thought. I have bought a piece of Dutch cheese and some biscuits, and disregarding the inmates of the one hideously plastered boarding-house recently built here, take off shoes and stockings, and sitting on a convenient rock sliding down into deep water, come into intimate touch with the infinities, and make these notes. Two pennyworth of Dutch cheese, with biscuits to match, a comfortable seat on a rocky ledge, your feet dabbling in the clear water, and sunshine over all, will bring you into close relation with the Infinite. Here I hew off in the rough a slab of the Simple Life, and enjoy it hugely. It is, I suppose, the sunshine and the solitude in collaboration. At any rate, it is obviously enough not the white ale. There are cornelians and lovely pebbles on this lonely strand, and sea-anemones, to the eye appetisingly like fruit-jellies, on the rocks. Alas! they are _not_ good to eat, and as fairy gold, we all know, turns to sere leaves, so the translucent pebbles of the wet sea-shore become the commonplace opaque stones that the next day we turn disgustedly out of our pockets. In short, it is life in little you find reflected here, and reduces the heady optimism of a summer noon to something like tears. I don’t expect, or hope, every one who comes to this salt margin of Devon will feel thus. This it is to be cursed with temperament, to be, against your will, a snivelling sentimentalist, whom the lowing of the cattle at eventide, the distant tinkling of the sheep-bells, or the very beauty of day or place will suffice to reduce to a chastened melancholy.