beautiful.

[Illustration: Heddon's Mouth, near Lynton]

Then a great cleft runs inland, fenced by a bold headland on either
hand, and I have rounded Highveer Point and am looking down Heddon's
Mouth. Heddon is the corruption of the Celtic word "etin," which means
a giant, and the Celtic spirit which so named this wild valley had
indeed a sense of the poetry and grandeur of places. Sheer either side
rise the slate hills, bare, waterless, and treeless. The southern hill
is one steep slope of scree; the northern hill, Highveer Point, on
which I stand, is covered with dead gorse and heather, which they have
been burning in the spring, and the sharp smell lingers still. A
thousand feet below runs the river, shut narrowly between these great
cliffs, with hardly foothold for a sparse sprinkle of trees between
these dark walls, and for the ribbon of white road that runs from the
sea to Hunter's Inn, a mile inland. There two streams meet, and the
place is as green as a little paradise, and bright with running waters,
but it lies round the bend of the hill on which I stand, and what I see
before me is this shadowless great gorge, without tree or shrub or
flower, the magnificent shoulders of cliff lifted against the hot and
cloudless sky; inland the heat shimmering on the rounded surface of
hill behind hill, and out to sea a little froth of white where the blue
water breaks into foam on the point of some just submerged jag of rock.
A vast silence holds the place, save for the deep undertone of the
rushing water far below, so deep and so distant that it is rather like
a dull vibration in my brain than a sound in my ears. The heavy
buzzing of a fly and the rattle of the wind in the brim of my straw hat
do not break this impression of great silence; they seem to lie on it
rather, like feathers on the surface of a deep pool. The shadow of a
hawk goes slowly past me on the dusty white road and across the bare
hillside, on an outcrop of rock, bleak and grey in this brilliant
light, a butterfly, a red admiral, stands motionless, his wonderful
wings of crimson and iridescent blue stretched wide, and shining in the
sunlight with incredible colour.

There are scenes of a different beauty at Lynton from that of these few
miles of cliff--and to me lacking something of the spaciousness and
splendour of Heddon's Mouth--but beautiful none the less. Go into
Lynmouth, down the steep and stony road--a true Devonshire road, still
the sa