At the secluded sands of Goodrington and Elbury Cove, that look perhaps their best from the trains that hurry by, the traveller bids farewell to the red rocks of Devon, and comes into the regions of limestone and slate. The way leads on to Brixham: the railway itself proceeding to Kingswear, opposite Dartmouth, and throwing off at “Churston Junction” a little two-mile branch to the heights above Brixham town. All day and every day a short train shuttlecocks those two miles, the engine pulling one way and pushing another. If there be any three persons better qualified above their fellows to speak of monotony, they must surely be the engine-driver, stoker, and guard of this train. The little terminus, so high above the town, smells like a fish-shop, for Brixham is pre-eminently in Devon the place of fish, and great trainloads go forth every day. You look astonishingly down upon roof-tops from this place. [Illustration: MILES COVERDALE’S TOWER, PAIGNTON.] Down there is Brixham, perched with seeming precariousness along the steeply sloping sides of the hills overlooking the pool that forms its crowded harbour. To those who have never seen the fisher towns of Cornwall it is an amazing place: those who know the Cornish coast realise that this is the first of the true West Country fishing harbours, and it seems to them to have strayed over into Devon by mistake. To speak by the card, the “Brixham” of modern speech is strictly “Brixham Quay,” and Higher Brixham, away up-along, on the high table-land, is the real original Brixham; but Brixham Quay long since supplanted the original place in importance. It is by far the largest and busiest fishing-port in Devon, and as different from Torquay in character as chalk proverbially is from cheese, marching-boots from patent-leathers, salt from sugar, or any other picturesque and striking antithesis you can think of. In Torquay you commonly hear Brixham spoken of as a “dirty, stinking hole” and by similar terms, the reverse of endearing, but while we may not deny it to be that, it is that and something more. It is natural, and characteristic of the real old seafaring and fishing life of this coast, and Torquay, however delightful, is not. Torquay and all “seaside resorts” are excrescences, and utterly uncharacteristic of the real indigenous life. No artist would choose to paint or sketch Torquay and its delightful but pictorially impossible villas, and smart but artistically desolating visitors; but Brixham is an artistic paradise. It is dirty but natural, smelly but picturesque at every turn. An excellent opportunity offers here, had we the leisure, for a philosophic disquisition on the delightfully picturesque qualities of dirt and untidiness, and the negation, artistically, of order and sanitation. Because of its wallowing in fish-offal and its generally rough-and-ready ways, Brixham is no place for the visitor, as generally understood; but artists rejoice in it and its ways.