The interior of the church has of late been exquisitely decorated and repaired: we will not say “restored,” for that word is rightly of ill-savour in these times. In place of the almost inevitable pitch-pine pews, or the commonplace chairs, there are green-stained, rush-bottomed chairs, with woodwork of the same hue: all very artistic and delightful, and sufficing to show that the more usual order of things is less inevitable than might be supposed, and only so common because taste is a quality of the rarest. Only, I would that these things did not so commonly go with that new reforming zeal which is sending the Church of England Romewards, so fast as its clergy dare. Here a faculty has been obtained for a rood-screen, and in general things are developing at a rate dangerous to that new movement itself and bringing that counter-reformation which is presently to repeat history. History, it is true, does repeat itself, but not on precisely identical lines, and the newer Reformation will be the disestablishment and disendowment of an unworthy Church, and free-trade in religion. There are weird rocks out beyond Thurlestone, on the coastwise route round to the Avon estuary; one of them—it may be glimpsed in the background of the Thurlestone illustration—resembling some monstrous growth of the mushroom kind. The direct way to the crossing of the Avon is through Thurlestone street, and thence by the hillside village of Buckland, and by Bantham, a hamlet nestling under the lee of the Ham, a great sandy elbow thrown up, ages ago, by the sea and the winds, in vain efforts to fling back the Avon upon itself. That river is no rushing torrent, but just a softly gliding stream; and the sand dunes have not sufficed to imprison it. All they have done is to turn its course aside, due west instead of south, and there, denied a direct access to the sea, it has eaten away the cliffs in a great semicircular mouthful, and goes gliding out to the Channel through a waste of flat sands. It was here in 1772 that the _Chanteloupe_, homeward-bound from the West Indies, was totally wrecked, and of all those on board only one person saved. Those were the times when the fisherfolk and shore-dwellers generally prayed for wrecks, and if none was forthcoming, helped Providence to produce them by exhibiting false lights on shore, to lure vessels to their doom. They thought no shame of asking, “O Lord, give us a good wreck,” and were perhaps very little more civilised than the savages of strange lands, who, thinking shipwrecked sailors, to have been shipwrecked at all, must be under the high displeasure of the gods, murder them out of hand, and consider themselves, in so doing, the vicars of those affronted deities.