ABOUT three miles from Morwenstow as the crow flies, and five or six by road, on the coast, is a little church and hamlet called Wellcombe. The church probably occupies the site of a cell of St. Nectan, and is dedicated to him. It is old and was interesting.[31] The parish forms a horseshoe with the heels toward the sea, which is here reached by a rapidly descending glen ending in a cove. It is a small parish, with some 230 inhabitants, people of a race different from those in the adjoining parishes, with black eyes and hair, and dark-skinned. “Dark-grained as a Wellcombe woman,” is a saying in the neighbourhood when a brunette is being described. The people are singularly ignorant and superstitious: they are a religious people, and attend church with great regularity and devotion. The chief landowner and lord of the manor is Lord Clinton, and the vicarage is in his gift. It is worth only seventy pounds, and there is neither glebe nor parsonage house; consequently Wellcombe formerly went with Hartland or Morwenstow. When Mr. Hawker became vicar of Morwenstow, Wellcombe was held by the vicar of Hartland; but on his death, in 1851, Lord Clinton gave it to Mr. Hawker. Mr. Hawker accordingly took three services every Sunday. He had his morning prayer at Morwenstow, at eleven, and then drove over to Wellcombe, where he had afternoon service at two P.M., and then returned to Morwenstow for evening prayer at five P.M. He never ate between services. Directly morning prayer was over, he got into his gig; a basket of pipes, all loaded, was handed in, and he drove off to Wellcombe, smoking all the way; and, after having taken duty, he smoked all the way back. Once a month he celebrated the holy communion at Wellcombe; and then, through the kindness of the rector of Kilkhampton, the morning service at Morwenstow was not allowed to fall through. Mr. Hawker for long acted as postman to Wellcombe. The inhabitants of that remote village did not often get letters; when missives arrived for them, they were left at Morwenstow vicarage, and on the following Sunday a distribution of the post took place in the porch after divine service. But the parishioners of Wellcombe were no “scholards”; and the vicar was generally required to read their letters to them, and sometimes to write the answers. On one occasion he was reading a letter to an old woman of Wellcombe, whose son was in Brazil. Part of the letter ran as follows: “I cannot tell you, dear mother, how the muskitties [mosquitoes] torment me. They never leave me alone, but pursue me everywhere.” “To think of that!” interrupted the old woman. “My Ezekiel must be a handsome lad! But I’m interrupting. Do you go on, please, parson.” “Indeed, dear mother,” continued the vicar, reading, “I shut my door and window of an evening, to keep them out of my room.” “Dear life!” exclaimed the old woman, “what will the world come to next!”