It is a rocky scramble round beyond the Ness to the open sea and Labrador, and no one, fortunately, has yet engineered a neat path that way. For one thing, it would be scarce worth the trouble of doing so while great fragments of rock come hurtling down from the cliff, thrust out by the frosts and thaws of winter. The way is strewn with these immense pieces of red conglomerate, weighing anything from five to twenty tons; and those who wear india-rubber shoes and can best imitate the chamois in rock-leaping are those who like best the exploration of the Ness. For others there is that “harvest of the quiet eye” down in the rock-pools that the tide has left, where, among the trailing seaweeds, the limpet clings with the tightness of a moribund government clinging to power, and only to be removed in the same way; by the sudden, unexpected blow, like the Parliamentary snap-division; where transparent things, showing their inwards in the most indelicate way, flit about unconcerned at that publicity, and the hermit-crab justifies his sponsors by hurrying, presto, to some rocky cell when you disturb this little _mare clausum_. [Illustration: AT SHALDON.] Tumbled rock-heaps, alternating with beaches, lead to the foot of the cliff by whose up-on-end path you breathlessly reach Labrador, a place known to every one who has visited Teignmouth. Local traditions tell how this cottage and garden, half-way up the four hundred feet of cliff, were the work of a retired sea-captain who, settling here from a long career in the Newfoundland trade, christened the place by the name it still bears. I do not suppose he ever contemplated it being converted into a picnic inn, but he _may_ have had an eye to a snug little traffic in smuggling, for which in his time it must have been especially adapted. However that may be, there is no questioning the popularity of Labrador, where teas are provided and swings tempt the giddy-minded, and roses clamber over the house-front in a manner suggestive of Persia and Omar Khayyàm. Why, with leisure—and genius—one might compose another _Rabaiyat_ when the tea-takers were gone. “I reckon,” says one of the soil, whom we meet here and exchange remarks with, “Twize up and down es a gude day’s work,” and it really is a leg-aching job to climb to the top of the cliff, which must be done to gain the Torquay road. South Devon is sleepy, and, experiencing this steepest of paths and hottest of hot corners, the stranger is not surprised. At any time it is possible to sit down and drop into a “bit of a zog”—which is Devonian for a nap.