Out of Kingston the road runs deep down below the level of the fields, in true Devonshire sort, with high banks and tall hedges on either side, so that no view is possible. Nor would it have mattered had it been otherwise when this Stanley of these remote parts passed this way, for the whole face of the land and sea and the blue of the sky was blotted out on this warm and close evening of a hot summer’s day by a white pillowy fog, which, the nearer the shore, grew more dense. After long tramping comes a left-hand turn, with a signpost inscribed “Mothecombe.” The name suggests some moth-eaten hamlet that would be all the better for plenty of camphor and a good airing; but presently one realises that _this_ is the place called by the coastguards “Muddycombe,” and more usually, in local speech, “Muthycombe.” It is a solitary road that leads down from this signpost, and the fog discloses only one person on the way: a boy, driving a cow. “Coom oop, Primrose,” says he, and that mild-featured dame and he turn into a field, the whiteness engulfs them at once, and the wayfarer is alone in the world. Suddenly the road ends, upon a sandflat. This is really the mouth of the Erme, the estuary where it slides out to sea, but it is infinitely mysterious in this smother of fog and woolly silence. The stranger, of course, assumes a village from the direction of that curt, staccato signpost up the road, but devil a house can he find here; only a something looming out from under low cliffs, which at first he takes to be an inn, and then a blockhouse fort, resolving itself finally into the inhospitable likeness of a ruined limekiln. The distant rustle and whispering of waves on the sea-shore comes fitfully through the fog, which breaks mysteriously and shows the river, with occasional glimpses of the woody banks opposite. For the rest, all is silence, save for an odd continuous buzzing or sizzling undertone, like bacon-frying, _piano_. It is marvellously like, and only the smell is wanting to complete the illusion, which is produced by the billions of sand-fleas living their little crowded hour in the sands and among the drying seaweed. Every time you kick over a tuft of weed you disturb a little world, and rouse that frying-bacon sound, as though a rasher had been turned in the frying-pan.