ning down to a tiny
bay, and set among a fine group of sheltering pine-cedars, was built
about 1850, and somewhat too much "after the Gothic style." Parts of
the house are of pleasant red brick, overgrown with glossy ivy, but a
portion of the building--dining-room or library, I do not know
which--is like an east window of the Perpendicular period, fitted with
sun-blinds! There was never an Abbey here, either, and the name is as
new as the Gothic, but there is history here, and tradition as well,
for the house stands on the site of the old Grange Farm of Lee, which
was a large, rambling, plain building, with gabled ends and thick
walls, thatched roof and tall chimneys, to which Hugh de Wichehalse
sent his family when the plague ravaged Barnstaple in 1627.

After that the de Wichehalses were for nearly a century the chief
family of Lynton, and the last of them, Mary, to whom her father left
this estate, is said to have returned here, after the ruin of her
family and her betrayal by a faithless lover, and to have lived here
with a faithful servant until she was drowned off Duty Point, either by
an accident, or, as tradition asserts, by throwing herself down from
the cliff, which is the southern point of the little bay. Her body was
never found, and the mixture of fact and legend which has gathered
round her forms the basis of the tragic tale of Jennifred de Wichehalse
which is given by the Reverend Mundy.

After leaving the grounds of Lee Abbey the road climbs steeply up the
opposite headland. Up this hot and stony road I went, leaving Lee Bay
below me, the tiniest of bays, a little blue rockgirt pool, guarded
with great shags of rock, into which runs a rivulet, down the greenest
and shadiest of gorges, where the trees meet overhead, and the clear
water runs between narrow banks of primroses, and the bright grass and
flowers follow the stream right down to the wave-smoothed stones of the
beach.

The sun beat on me as I climbed the hill, and the dust rose as I walked
from the loose, stony road. I came gladly into the shelter of trees,
ash and oak chiefly, not yet out in leaf on this exposed slope, though
the celandines and wild anemone were in flower, and the ground and the
banks were green with new growth, ground-ivy and columbine, with its
heart-shaped glossy leaves, wild parsley, and the beautiful serrated
little leaves of the wild strawberry. On the left-hand side of the
road, on the higher slopes, the trees ha