the evening sky to their tall green elm-trees as if they had
never sailed over the heads of men who looked up and saw in them the
symbol of peace, security, and comfort, which they loved to call England.

For a good walker the road that lies between Lynmouth and Porlock is an
adventure worth taking, though it gives a taste of the steep and
shadeless roads which lead up and down these moors, pitilessly
sun-scorched in summer, and pitilessly bleak and windswept in winter,
when the rain and sleet comes stinging and driving in your face, and yet
somehow, at all times of the year, worth adventuring for the splendid,
open, untamed beauty they show you.

If you take carriage (in which case you will walk the greater part of the
way!), you will start from Lynmouth, and ascend the steep hill that leads
right up the cliff to Countisbury Foreland--I should have said the
steepest two miles of carriage road in England, had I not also climbed
Porlock Hill, twelve miles northward. The surface of the road is loose,
and scoured by winter rains, and on a windy day the dust comes swirling
down it like a miniature sandstorm. I have, indeed, seen even a car
obliged to draw up to let the blinding red swirl go by; and from Lynton,
on the opposite side of the valley, the whole headland has been blurred
and obliterated by the dust, as if it were a fog.

If you are not driving, you may go up the East Lyn Valley, past the
Watersmeet, till you strike the path for Brendon, a more sheltered way on
a hot morning, but steep also, for the hills are not to be avoided, and
you have somehow to climb 1,300 feet from the sea to Countisbury.
Countisbury itself is a tiny, bare, white-washed hamlet, with a small
bare white inn with the sign of the Blue Ball; it stands on the borders
of Devon and Somerset, and hence some have supposed the name to mean the
"county's boundary"--but this, I think, is a case of false analogy, and
the Celtic origin of the "camp on the headland" is far more likely.

[Illustration: The Moors near Brendon Two Gates]

The Foreland is a great bold promontory looking towards the Welsh coast,
which hangs on the horizon like a low silver cloud above the faint haze
of the summer sea. Below lie Sillery Sands, and the caves of the beach;
beyond, the opening heights of Exmoor, in long flat curves, featureless,
spacious, and beautiful, purple and sombre under the wrack of
rain-clouds, grey and arid in the fierce blaze of the midsummer sun,