The seven hills—or more—on which Torquay is built are dotted plentifully with the largest and finest of these quiet villas, and the hollows in between are cut up into winding roads, where the stranger may speedily lose his bearings. If you consult a plan of Torquay, it will be perceived that the roads of its residential districts are like so many vermiculations, returning upon one another and intertwining almost with the intricacy of whorls in a Celtic design. It must have been far easier to find one’s way about the site of Torquay a century ago than now, and in many respects it was surely a more desirable place. From existing records one may form a very exact picture of it, say in 1815, when the long-dreaded “Boney,” for many years a figure of terror to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, was brought captive on the _Bellerophon_ into Tor Bay, to be revealed to the gaping hundreds who put off in boats to see him, as merely a little fat man, clean-shaven, melancholy, and obviously unwell, mildly pacing the quarter-deck, and saying unexpectedly complimentary things about the scenery and the climate. Its inhabitants then numbered about fifteen hundred, chiefly fishermen and the wives and families of naval officers, who, anchoring from time to time in the safe and roomy anchorage of Tor Bay, had first “discovered” the place. It was then still little more than that Quay at the foot of the hills (or “Tors”) it had been when William of Orange landed at Brixham, in 1688; and the fine old residence of Tor Abbey, seat then as now of the Carys, was the only considerable place in the neighbourhood. The hill-tops were yet in a state of nature, except the crest of Chapel Hill, where the little chapel of St. Michael formed a notable landmark for sailors. This was, according to legend, the offering of some ancient mariner, and displayed a beacon-light at night, to guide shipping safely into the bay. The ancient chapel, one of the smallest in England, measuring only thirty-six feet in length, remains to this day, two hundred and seventy feet above the sea, at the modern suburb of Torre, and is part of the borough meteorological station. [Illustration: THE ANCIENT CHAPEL OF ST. MICHAEL, TORRE.]