Even the pioneers have not made all the way easy; for you come at last to what Devonshire people call “zoggy plaaces,” where the willow and hazel bushes stand in mossy ground, and the primroses grow an unwonted size, by reason of the excessive moisture. Here you must calculate every step and nicely test the mossy hummocks before fully trusting them; finally emerging upon an open plain midway between the sea below and tall cliffs above; a plain where rocks of every shape and size have been hurled down in extraordinary confusion. Here the explorer requires not a little of the suppleness and agility of the chamois, and growing at last weary of bounding hazardously from crag to crag, climbs with extraordinary labour, past monstrous grey, ivy-grown spires and pinnacles of limestone, up a winding footpath in the face of the cliff, to where the Whitlands Coastguard station looks down upon the tumbled scene. From this point the coastguard-path lies along the cliffs’ edge, to where the cliffs die down to the waterside in the deep coombe in whose woods the sea comes lapping at Charton Bay. Here a limekiln, that looks romantic enough for a castle, stands on the beach, with the dense woods climbing backwards, and on the skyline the roofs and tower and chimneys of Rousdon. [Illustration: ROUSDON.] Rousdon is a remarkable place. It shows you what may be done in the wholesale grocery way of business, for the estate was enclosed, and the great mansion built by Sir Henry Peek, between 1871 and 1883. When that wealthy baronet set about becoming a landed proprietor here, he found a wild expanse stretching down from the high land by the main road between Lyme and Seaton, toward the sea, and he enclosed some two hundred and fifty acres, and on the upper part built a magnificent house, whose beauties we will not stop to describe in this place, because, if a beginning were made with it, and the collections of various sorts within, it would be no easy task to conclude. He found here, amid these solitudes, the ruinous little church of St. Pancras, of Rousdon, used as the outhouse of a farm. Its rector was an absentee, not greatly needed, for the entire parish numbered but sixteen persons, all employed on the farm itself. A new church was built in the grounds, and a member of the Peek family appointed rector; and thus we see the remarkable spectacle of a parish as self-contained as any box of sardines; with the whole of the inhabitants employed upon the estate, and free trade in religion abolished. I think no monarchy is quite so absolute. A remarkable feature of Rousdon mansion is the extensive use, internally, of Sicilian marble. The great staircase, and other portions of the house are built of it, and a beautiful dairy is wholly decorated with this material. It came here in a romantic and wholly unexpected way; having been the cargo of a ship wrecked on the rocks off Rousdon at the time when plans for the building were being made.