Exeter is an interesting city, and its citizens, in their own streets and in their everyday garb are sufficiently amiable, but when Exmouth on Sundays and other holiday-times is overrun with Exeter’s young men, tradesmen’s assistants, clad in the impossible clothes pictured on provincial advertisement boardings, laughing horse-laughs, singing London’s last season’s comic songs, wearing flashy jewellery, and smoking bad cigars, Exeter’s reputation, and Exmouth’s suffer alike. If you can imagine such a curious hybrid as a provincial cockney—the type really exists, although it has not yet been noticed by men of science—you may picture something of Exmouth’s week-end patrons. The provincial cockney, poor thing, imagines himself in the forefront of style, but he is merely a caricature of the London cockney plus his own accent, which, wedded to cockney slang, is peculiarly offensive. But Exmouth, when its week-end patrons are behind their counters, in their aprons, is a vastly-different place. It is cheap, and has always been, and always will be, but it is at last sloughing off that air of impending bankruptcy that once sat so dolefully upon the scene; and the shops that were once mere apologies are now for the most part real shops, and stocked with articles less than ten years old. Moreover, the tennis lawns and gardens have grown by lapse of time into things of beauty: the lawns becoming something else than bald patches of red earth, and the gardens luxuriant indeed. But cheap railway trips from Exeter, only ten miles distant, by South Western Railway, have determined the character of Exmouth for ever, and grey stucco, only on the outskirts occasionally varied with red brick, or rough-cast, has clothed it in a sad shabbiness until its ninety-nine years building-leases shall have lapsed. Modern times, however, are making themselves felt in other directions. In early days, when the town of Exmouth was merely a longshore settlement called “Pratteshythe,” situated where the docks now are, the mouth of the river was largely obstructed by an immense sandbank stretching from this shore. At some unnamed period this geographical feature of the place changed sides, and has for centuries past been that delightfully wild, nearly two-miles long wilderness, “the Warren,” which extends a sandy arm from Langston Cliff; leaving something less than half-a-mile of fairway at the mouth of Exe. Until quite recently the Warren has remained the haunt of the wild-fowler and the naturalist, but now the red roofs of bungalows are beginning to plentifully dot the wastes; and to play at Robinson Crusoe, with twentieth-century embellishments and more or less luxurious fringes, has become a favourite summer pastime on this once solitary haunt of the heron, the wild duck, and the sea-mew.