A traveller’s curse upon all landowners who suppress inns, and all villages without spirit sufficient to maintain one. Here the “Seven Stars” inn of guide-books, the only inn of Chivelstone, was not in existence, and this obviously was no resting-place. So to East Prawle, along a featureless road, in a wet and swirling fog, the way made musical with the howls and trumpetings of the Start fog-horn. East Prawle ceased its growth in the act of developing from a farm-yard into a village; so that there are cottages where there should be ricks and cow-byres, and muck where there should be houses. Grass grows and liquid manure lies in the road, and stones and rocks in the pastures; and, altogether, Prawle, which is a very undesirable spot of earth, is a splendid example of matter in the wrong place. But gentility of a kind has come to Prawle. You can never tell: the wind bloweth where it listeth; overmantels and preposterous photograph-frames, to say nothing of spiky articles of furniture in bamboo-ware, all projections and easily overset through the window, are to be found in the unlikeliest places. And that is how—Heaven help them and us!—they spell gentility at Prawle. The Point—well-known by name to diligent readers of the shipping news in the daily papers—is crowned at Hurter’s Top with the Lloyd’s signal station, where the vessels going out and home are “spoken.” It is a rude and jagged Point, and its rugged character lends it an air of greater height than it possesses. It rises suddenly out of a down, sloping towards the sea, and may be compared with the appearance of a hacked and uneven quarter of a round Dutch cheese. Off this point H.M.S. _Crocodile_ was wrecked, and on the next westerly headland, Gammon Head, two Spanish galleons. All the way round from this point the great dark mass of Bolt Head shows finely, away across the arm of the sea running up between Portlemouth and Salcombe. Portlemouth, although of so impressive a name, is a meagre place on the very crest of the rugged upland overlooking Salcombe and the Kingsbridge River, and consists of merely a farmhouse with a few cottages grouped round the ancient church of St. Onolaus, otherwise, abating that Latinised form, the early sixth-century British St. Winwaloe. The horribly plastered exterior of the tower would dissuade many from seeking a further acquaintance with the church, by which the finely carved and painted thirteenth-century rood screen would be missed. In the churchyard, to the north-west of the tower, is a grim slate headstone, with a still more grim epitaph, on one “Richard Jarvis, of Rickham in this parish, who departed this life the 25th day of May 1782, aged 79:— “Through poison he was cut off And brought to death at last. It was by his apprentice-girl, On whom there’s sentence past. O may all people warning take, For she was burnèd at the stake.”