a. From our house, or from the field at the back of our
house, or from any part of the village itself, there was no
appearance to suggest that there could lie anything in an
easterly direction to break the infinitude of red ploughed
fields. But on that earliest morning, how my heart remembers we
hastened,--Miss Marks, the maid, and I between them, along a
couple of high-walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an
immense arc of light, there stretched the enormous plain of
waters. We had but to cross a step or two of downs, when the
hollow sides of the great limestone cove yawned at our feet,
descending, like a broken cup, down, down to the moon of snow-
white shingle and the expanse of blue-green sea.

In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has
studded the down with rustic seats and has shut its dangers out
with railings, has cut a winding carriage-drive round the curves
of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage-laurels at
intervals in clearings made for that aesthetic purpose. When last
I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair in
curl-papers and its feet in patent-leathers, I turned from it in
anger and disgust, and could almost have wept. I suppose that to
those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty. No
parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of
the waters or compress the vastness of the sky. But what man
could do to make wild beauty ineffectual, tame and empty, has
amply been performed at Oddicombe.

Very different was it fifty years ago, in its uncouth majesty. No
road, save the merest goat-path, led down its concave wilderness,
in which loose furze-bushes and untrimmed brambles wantoned into
the likeness of trees, each draped in audacious tissue of wild
clematis. Through this fantastic maze the traveller wound his
way, led by little other clue than by the instinct of descent.
For me, as a child, it meant the labour of a long, an endless
morning, to descend to the snow-white pebbles, to sport at the
edge of the cold, sharp sea, and then to climb up home again,
slipping in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth boughs of
the wild ash, toiling, toiling upwards into flat land out of that
hollow world of rocks.

On the first occasion I recollect, our Cockney housemaid,
enthusiastic young creature that she was, flung herself down upon
her knees, and drank of the salt waters. Miss Marks, more
instructed in phenomena, r