The Devonshire folk—the rustic sort, at any rate—generally call their Avon the “Aune,” and a little hamlet not far from this same Bantham is “Aunemouth;” while the village of Aveton Gifford, standing up-river, where the salt estuary becomes a freshwater stream, is impartially “Aveyton,” or “Auton,” “Jifford.” At Bantham Ferry the boatman puts you across for twopence, or however much or little he thinks you will stand—and it is only the matter of a dozen strokes at low water. And then you have the sands, the loose stones, and the rustling bennets and the sedges all to yourself; a kind of seashore Sahara. Then you round a rocky point; and there before you is Burr Island, a majestic reek of acetylene, or other gas, and people. Wide stretch the sands at ebb, but they are not so wide but that the prints of footsteps have disfigured them pretty thoroughly; for where the land slopes down to the shore in grassy fields, the Plymouth people have built bungalows, and are building more. Burr, or Borough, Island is tethered to the mainland at ebb by this nexus of sand. It is in this circumstance a kind of minor St. Michael’s Mount, and like it again in that it once owned a chapel dedicated to St. Michael. The chapel disappeared in the lang syne, and when the solitary public-house—whose deserted roof-tree may still be seen—ceased business, civilisation and Borough Island wholly parted company. Beyond this point is the little sand-smothered bight of Challaborough, with a coastguard station, where this explorer, at least, met coastguards of exceptional stupidity and astonishing ignorance of the coast beyond their own insignificant nook. Why, they could not even spell or pronounce the name of their own station properly, and made it “Shellaborough.” “Erme Mouth?” they had never heard of it, nor of the Erme River, but dimly conceived “Muddycombe,” to be meant. And as for the coast, they spoke of it in such awestruck terms that (it shall be confessed) the time drawing on towards evening, I made inland, and so do not know’ what manner of dragons and chimeras those are, which no doubt inhabit the three miles and a half of a not very rugged shore, awaiting the advent of a fine juicy tourist.