“Reader aske not who lyes here Vnlesse thou meanst to drop a tear. Father and son heere joyntly have One life, one death, one tombe, one grave. Impartial hand that durst to slay The root and branch both in a day. Our comfort in there death is this, That both are gonne to joy and bliss; The wine that in these earthen vessels lay The hand of death hath lately drawn away, And, as a present, served it up on high, Whilst heere the vessels with the lees doe lye.” Another records the end of a labourer accidentally shot on his returning home from work, and yet another is to an exciseman, “who fell from the cliff between Beer and Seaton, as he was extinguishing a fire which was a signal to a smuggling boat.” The verse on Joseph Braddick, a farmer, who died suddenly at sheep-shearing, hesitates between flippancy and exhortation: “Strong and at labour suddenly he reels, Death came behind him and struck up his heels, Such sudden strokes, surviving mortals, bid ye Stand on your watch, and to be allso ready.” This collection is ended with the touching record of a French sailor-lad: Sacred to the Memory of JEAN JACQUES WATTEZ, Mariner, of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Drowned at Torbay, 29th March, 1897. Buried here 30th June, 1897. Aged 17 years. “The only son of his mother, and she a widow.” St. Luke vii. 12. There is fine, rough walking up over the cliffs past the coastguard station of Branscombe, or down by the sandy shingle to Littlecombe Shoot and Weston Mouth, where the landsprings well out of the marly cliff-sides and petrify everything within reach. At the cost of scaling some of the buttery slides of red mud, and becoming more or less smothered with an ochreous mess resembling anchovy paste, it is possible to find most interesting examples of petrified moss and blackberry brambles; but the weaker brethren and those “righteous men” (as defined by Mrs. Poyser), who are “keerful of their clothes,” purchase such specimens as they may at Branscombe, and on their return home, yarn about the Alpine difficulties of discovering them. On the summit to the western side of Weston Mouth, away back from the beetling edge of Dunscombe Cliff, 350 feet above the sea, stands the picturesque group of Dunscombe Farm and the ruined, ivy-mantled walls of what seems to have been an old manor-house. To this succeeds the valley of Salcombe, with the village of Salcombe Regis, away a mile inland. It is a long, long way into Sidmouth, through Salcombe Regis, whose “Regis” was added so long ago as the time of Athelstan, who owned the manor and the salt-pans down in the combe by the sea. When you have come to the houses and think this is Sidmouth, it is only Landpart, and there is very near another mile to go; which, if you have acquired what the Devon people call a “kibbed”—that is to say a rubbed—heel by dint of much walking, is a distressing thing. CHAPTER VI SIDMOUTH