The Torquay road is inexorably hilly and white and hot, but it looks inland down on to samples of Canaan, where, amid a blue haze of fertility, you see trees and grass more nearly blue than green, among the freshly turned fields that are red. It is a land of fatness. There, down in those folded valleys, is a distant glimpse of the Teign, with the white-faced, yellow-thatched cottages of “Stokeintinny” and “Cumeintinny” enwrapped in an air of prosperity; and here is the ridge-road, like an oven. “Aw! my dear sawls, ’tes tar’ble hot.” Here stands the old toll-house the country folk call “Solomon’s Post”; but why? Ah! he who pervades the country asking for the reasons of things is not to be envied. For my part, the likeliest reason of this name is that the tolls on this turnpike-trust may have been farmed by one of those numerous Jews who took up that class of business. Lanes on the left-hand presently lead down to Minnicombe and Maidencombe, where there are embowered hamlets giving upon the sea; and in another mile yet another leads down to Watcombe. Watcombe is not what it was fifteen years ago. Then a countryfied lane opened out upon a grassy valley dropping to the sea. From the turf there soared aloft the ruddiest of all the ruddy cliffs of South Devon, seamed and seared with the weathering of ages, and as thickly pocketed with holes as a Post Office _poste-restante_ rack. The cliff is there, as ever, and the holes, and the pigeons and jackdaws that inhabit them, but the undergrowth has grown up in dense and tangled masses everywhere, the hedges of the rustic lane have given place to stone walls, and all the pleasant approaches are enclosed in the grounds of somebody’s private domain. Confound Somebody, say I: may the dogs defile the grave of his great-great-grandmother. But let us take these outrages as calmly as we may, or not seek to further explore; for the approach to Torquay through Babbacombe and Marychurch is a perfect orgie of Wall. It must have been a difficult and an expensive matter to so successfully shut out the scenery, but it has been so thoroughly done that when you do at last come to the cliff-top of Babbacombe Downs, the lovely clear outlook there over the sea and down to the beach seems, by contrast, like a hole in the wall.