of a man rather than a fish.  About two miles from Cofton was the village of Mamhead, with its obelisk built in 1742, one hundred feet high, on the top of a spur of the Great Haldon Hill.  The rector of the church here at one time was William Johnson Temple, often mentioned in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.  He was the grandfather of Frederick Temple, Bishop of Exeter at the time we passed through that city, afterwards Bishop of London, and finally Archbishop of Canterbury, to whose harsh voice and common sense we had once listened when he was addressing a public meeting in Manchester.  In the churchyard at Mamhead was an enormous yew tree, over eight hundred years old.  In 1775, when Boswell came to see Lord Lisburne at Mamhead Park, and stayed at the vicarage, he was so much impressed by the size and magnificence of this great tree, that he made a vow beneath its great branches “never to be drunk again”—­a vow he soon forgot when he was out of sight of the tree.

We soon arrived at the pretty little town of Dawlish, and perhaps it was its unique appearance that gave us the impression that we had reached another of the prettiest places we had visited.  There we halted for refreshments and for a hurried excursion in and about the town, as we were anxious to reach Torquay before night, where we had decided to stay until Monday morning.  We walked towards the source of the water, which comes down from the higher lands in a series of pretty little waterfalls, spreading out occasionally into small lakes adorned at the sides with plots of grass and beds of flowers.  The name Dawlish, we learned, came from two Cornish words meaning “deep stream,” or, as some have it, “Devil’s Water”; and behind the town on Haldon Hill was the “Devil’s Punchbowl,” from which descended the water that passed through the town, but which is in much too pleasant a position, we thought, to be associated with his satanic majesty.

[Illustration:  THE CONGER ROCK, DAWLISH]

Modern Dawlish (though “Doflisc” appears in early charters) only dated from the year 1810, when the course of a small stream was changed, and the pretty waterfalls made; rustic bridges were placed over it and houses built near the banks; this scheme, which was intended to make the fortunes of the prospectors and of the inhabitants generally, was completed at the beginning of November in that year.  But, sad to relate, before nine o’clock on the morning of November 10th in that same year scarcely a vestige of the improvements remained, and in place of a small rippling stream came a great river, which swept away four houses with stables and other buildings and eight wooden bridges.  It seemed almost as if the devil had been vexed with the prospectors for interfering with his water, and had caused this devastation to punish them for their audacity.  But a great effort was made in 1818, and a more permanent scheme on similar lines was completed; and Dawlish as we saw it in 1871 was a delightful place suggestive of a quiet holiday or honeymoon resort.  Elihu Burritt, in his Walk from London to Land’s End, speaks well of Dawlish; and Barham, a local poet and a son of the renowned author of Ingoldsby Legends, in his legend “The Monk of Haldon,” in the July number of Temple Bar in 1867, wrote: