The Watersmeet, the point where the Hoaroak Water joins the East Lyn,
breaking down over a thunderous small white waterfall, and a beautiful
spot enough, is vulgarized by notices embodying the commercial rivalry
of two different tea-houses. By one you are invited to walk on the
right bank of the river, as being the only public footpath (given in
the official guide of the Lynton Urban District Council); by the other
you are invited to a "unique view" of the Watersmeet, and assured you
will be solicited for patronage in no way.

On the loneliest, loveliest day in early summer this smacks of tourist
parties, and I made haste to leave the river path and the sheltering
trees and climb the road to Brendon, a road as steep and hot, as stony
and glaring, as I have ever climbed. Up and up I went for half an
hour, seeing nothing but the banks and hedges on either hand; every
turn in the road I thought was the last span that would bring me out on
the hill-tops, and every turn of the road showed me another. But at
last I stood above Brendon, and before me spread the moors, brown and
purple in the sunlight, and the little old grey church of Brendon just
below me, in a slight dip of the high ground.

[Illustration: Castle Rock, Lynton]

The woods of the Lyn Valley climbed to my feet, and I sat down in the
shade of the outermost fringe of trees to eat my lunch, and dream and
muse, and doze away the first hot hours of the afternoon. I sat
looking down over the valley; below me and to right and left the green
spikes of the larches were aflutter in the wind; before me rose a great
bare shoulder of hill, outlined sharply against the blue. Overhead the
sun was blazing, but in the wood the sunlight hung mistily among the
trunks and branches of oak and birch; it looked as if the wood were
filled with tremulous sunlit water, rather than with air and sun. The
air from off the moors was keen and very sweet. I lay on the dry,
clean turf and moss, looking up at the cloudless sky; a solitary
swallow hawking far up seemed no bigger than a fly, and a brilliant
green fly on a leaf above me, buzzing turbulently, seemed portentously
big and important. I lost my sense of space and time and of the world
in relation to men, set, as it were, as the background to men, and I
slipped into a world which belongs to the birds and the mice and the
moles, and the fish in the clear stream below; I watched the
chaffinches and thrushes, and a little grey