s from the open sea that
comes off Plymouth Sound, help to make the grand effect; and the
feelings of few can be quite unstirred by the battleships, or perhaps
black sinister destroyers, and the multitude of other shipping lying at
anchor in that famous haven, and by the thought of all that they mean to
us.

CHAPTER XI

The Taw and the Torridge

'Hither from my moorland home,
Nymph of Torridge, proud I come;
Leaving fen and furzy brake,
Haunt of eft and spotted snake ...
Nursling of the mountain sky,
Leaving Dian's choir on high,
Down her cataracts laughing loud,
Ockment leapt from crag and cloud,
Leading many a nymph, who dwells
Where wild deer drink in ferny dells....
Graecia, prize thy parsley crown;
Boast thy laurel, Caesar's town;
Moorland myrtle still shall be
Badge of Devon's Chivalry!'

KINGSLEY: _Westward Ho!_

'All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon
must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards
from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old
bridge, where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland
in the west. Above the town the hills close in, cushioned with deep
oak-woods, through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed
slate; below they lower and open more and more on softly rounded knolls
and fertile squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide
expanse of hazy flats, rich salt-marshes, and rolling sand-hills, where
Torridge joins her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly toward the
broad surges of the bar and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic
swell.'

It is difficult to imagine that there could be a more fitting
description of Bideford than that drawn in the opening words of
'Westward Ho!' Bideford, it has been said, is spoilt by ugly modern
houses, but the remark implies a matter-of-fact view, for the ugliness
and modernness are only skin-deep, and can easily be ignored. A matter
of far greater importance is that there is an old-world essence, a
dignity in the whole tone and spirit of the town, that keep it in touch
with the glorious past.

Faithful followers of the heroes on the borderland of myth--King Arthur,
Charlemagne, Holger Danske--believed that in their country's need these
would arise from the shades to lead their people to victory; and at
Bideford one feels that, should any 'knight of the