The Yealm runs up, as a deep, narrow and beautiful salt estuary for some three miles inland, and excursion steamers from Plymouth penetrate so far as Steer Point, where Kitley and Coffleet creeks branch right and left to Yealmpton—“Yampton” locally—and Brixton, and in the middle the smaller creek of Puslinch. The fresh water stream of the Yealm, like all the streams of South Devon, comes from Dartmoor. The banks of the estuary are deeply wooded and extremely picturesque; presenting, more than any of those numerous inlets that are so notable a feature of this coast, the appearance of a gorge; Noss Mayo standing on its branch creek, deriving, indeed, the first part of its name from the projecting height—the “ness” or “nose”—on which it stands. Noss in 1849 suffered terribly from cholera, and even more terribly two centuries ago, when only seven of its inhabitants survived. By the row-boat ferry at Yealm Mouth the explorer is put to the tiring scramble towards Wembury. Descending the hillside fields of corn, the lonely church is seen, and over it, out to sea, the famous Mewstone appears, rising, a huge, abrupt and angular mass of dark limestone rock, a mile off-shore. Dangerous, and nearly inaccessible though it be at most times, it and its surrounding sea look so innocent and harmless under the sun of a still day in July that the evil reputation of that rock and these waters seems based on insubstantial grounds. Yet the Mewstone has amply occasioned the poetic tribute: “The sullen crash, the shriek of wild despair, One moment swell the gust that whistles by; The next—no sound of living voice is there, None, save the waken’d sea-mew’s dreary cry.” The verse points to the origin of the name of this and the several other Mewstones along this coast of Devon; the sea-mew is of course the sea-gull, and these isolated reefs so many “sea-gull rocks.” References are often found in literature to the “laughter of the gulls,” but the name of “sea-mew” more nearly indicates the sound of the peevish cry of those birds, which closely resembles the mew of a cat. About 1836 the Mewstone was inhabited by one Samuel Wakeham and his wife, who lived in a little rustic house and looked after Squire Calmady’s rabbits, which swarmed the seemingly lifeless rock. The Mewstone was made the subject of an article in a local South Devon magazine, and (according to the editor of it) drew the annexed reply from the “Lord of the Isles,” as the editor calls him. The thing is amusing, but smells suspiciously like an editorial invention: