The waters of the Ley are crowded with ferocious pike and other fish, and the vast banks of sedge and rush are peopled thickly, not only with the winter concourse of wild duck and geese, but with the shy birds of the fields and woods. Inland, the marshy lowlands ascend gently, with white-faced cottages in little groups among the trees, and an old bridge spans the water at a favourable point and helps a bye-road on the way to Slapton. The scene is not greatly disturbed; the midday coach comes by on the high road, with a cheerful tootling of its horn, and disappears, on the way to Torcross; a wild bird pipes as it flies overhead, and a fish leaps up from the still water, after a fly; that is the summer aspect. But in winter the wild-fowler wakes the echoes of the hills with his sport, and when the gales blow strong out of the south-west there is a sea-wrack in the air and foam in the road, that make the enterprise of walking from Street to Torcross almost as wet a business as sea-bathing. Torcoss is a hamlet at the extremity of the Sands, where the road turns inland to Charleton, Stokenham, and Kingsbridge. Its back is to the slightly projecting headland that divides these sands from the further stretches of sand and shingle, extending towards the Start, and with an air of wondering mildly at its own existence, and further wondering if it is really worth while to exist at all, it faces the long flat road along which we have come. Of all the unlikely places, here is an hotel, and out of that hotel, as the present chronicler passed, there came a German waiter in a dress suit, and stood on the beach among the bronzed fishermen, watching the evolutions of a naval squadron, half a mile off-shore, in the deep water of Start Bay. Thinking many things and strange, I passed upon my way. [Illustration: TORCROSS.] The direct road to Kingsbridge lies to the right hand, through Stokenham. That the quiet of country life was in the long ago occasionally broken by picturesque doings denied to us is evident in this extract from the parish records of the year 1581: “Henri Muge, a pirat of the sea, was hanged in chains upon the Start, the 28 day of September.” Another interesting record at Stokenham—which, by the way, you must be careful not to pronounce “Stok’n’am” but “Stoke-en-ham,” as though it were a dish, like eggs-and-ham—is the epitaph upon: “Katherine Randle, daughter of William Richard Randle, who was shot March 12th, 1646.