From Brixham, an hour’s drive over bad roads brought us to Dartmouth, whither we had been attracted by the enthusiastic language of an English writer who asserts that “There is scarcely a more romantic spot in the whole of England than Dartmouth.  Spread out on one of the steep slopes of the Dart, it overlooks the deep-set river toward the sea.  Steep wooded banks rising out of the water’s edge give the winding of the estuaries a solemn mystery which is wanting in meadows and plough-land.  In the midst of scenery of this character—­and it must have been richer still a few centuries back—­the inhabitants of Dartmouth made its history.”

As we approached the town, the road continually grew worse until it was little better than the average unimproved country highway in America, and the sharp loose stones everywhere were ruinous on tires.  It finally plunged sharply down to a steamboat ferry, over which we crossed the Dart and landed directly in the town.  There are few towns in England more charmingly located than old Dartmouth, and a hundred years ago it was an important seaport, dividing honors about equally with Plymouth.

The road to Dartmouth was unusually trying; the route which we took to Plymouth was by odds the worst of equal distance we found anywhere.  We began with a precipitous climb out of the town, up a very steep hill over a mile long, with many sharp turns that made the ascent all the more difficult.  We were speedily lost in a network of unmarked byways running through a distressingly poor-looking and apparently quite thinly inhabited country.  After a deal of studying the map and the infrequent sign-boards we brought up in a desolate-looking little village, merely a row of gray stone, slate-roofed houses on either side of the way, and devoid of a single touch of the picturesque which so often atones for the poverty of the English cottages.  No plot of shrubbery or flower-garden broke the gray monotony of the place.  We had seen nothing just like it in England, though some of the Scotch villages which we saw later, matched it very well.

Here a native gave us the cheerful information that we had come over the very road we should not have taken; that just ahead of us was a hill where the infrequent motor cars generally stalled, but he thought that a good strong car could make it all right.  Our car tackled the hill bravely enough, but slowed to a stop before reaching the summit; but by unloading everybody except the driver, and with more or less coaxing and adjusting, it was induced to try it again, with a rush that carried it through.  The grade, though very steep, was not so much of an obstacle as the deep sand, with which the road was covered.  We encountered many steep hills and passed villages nearly as unprepossessing as the first one before we came to the main Plymouth-Exeter road, as excellent a highway as one could wish.  It was over this that our route had originally been outlined, but our spirit of adventure led us into the digression I have tried to describe.  It was trying at the time, but we saw a phase of England that we otherwise would have missed and have no regrets for the strenuous day in the Devonshire byways.