their friends for as much as four days or a
week, snow-bound in some small village until the railway line was
cleared and the postal service re-established.

[Illustration: The Doone Valley in Winter]

The fury of such a storm across these always windy Exmoor heights can
hardly be imagined; only Conrad could convey in words some adequate
idea of the fury and the force, as he has done in "Typhoon." Anyone
who was in Exmoor during these three days would have been fortunate to
have reached shelter alive, and not to have been lost, as were so many
unfortunate sheep and ponies, in the deep snowdrifts. There is a scene
in "Lorna Doone," where John Ridd and his servant Fry go out on a bleak
stormy morning to rescue their sheep from the snow, which gives a vivid
picture of what must have been many times enacted in the Exmoor valleys
during those wild March days. Of the loveliness of the scene when the
snow had fallen, and after the fury of the wind had abated, when the
March sun shone on the smooth upland curves and beautiful rounded
hollows of the moors, stainlessly white and wonderful under the
clearing sky, Mr. Widgery's picture of Lorna's Bower under snow gives a
beautiful impression.

Apart from its cattle industry and its herrings, Minehead was noted in
the seventeenth century for its alabaster mines, "harder than ye
Darbishire alabaster," says Thomas Gerard in his "Particular
Description of Somerset," written in 1633; "but for variety of mixture
and colours it surpasseth any, I dare say, of this kingdom." The mines
are said to have been discovered by a Dutchman, but I cannot find that
they were much worked, or were very abundant; for there is no record of
them a century and a half later. They were not like the Combe Martin
silver-mines, which were worked for centuries--some say in the time of
the Phoenicians, when the mines of Cornwall furnished tin for half the
bronze in Europe--which helped Henry V to pay for his wars in France,
and were reopened by Adrien Gilbert in Queen Elizabeth's time, and a
great cup and cover, fashioned from the silver, was presented by him to
the City of London, and may still be seen among the city plate. The
water got into the workings, and they were running poor after so many
centuries, and were finally abandoned in the seventeenth century; for
which Combe Martin is the more picturesque, according to our modern
standards, if less prosperous.

There is another industry of Minehead,