only, perhaps, all the admirers of "Lorna Doone" have not had the good
fortune to wander through the romantic and picturesque region where
the scene of the story is laid. To travel in North Devon, and over its
border into Somerset ("the Summerland," as the old Northmen call it),
is to be confronted with the scenes of the novel at every turn; for Mr.
Blackmore has so successfully woven the legends of the whole countryside
into his story that one grows to believe it a veritable history, and is
as disappointed to find traces of the romancer's own hand here and there
as to find the hills and valleys laid bare of the forests which adorned
them in the time of the Doones.

It is a singular country, this Devonshire coast, made up as it is of
a series of rocky headlands jutting far out into the sea, and holding
between their stretching arms deep fertile wooded valleys called
_combes_ (pronounced _coomes_), watered by trout and salmon streams, and
filled with an Italian profusion of vegetation, myrtles and fuchsias,
growing in the open air, and the walls hidden with a luxuriant tapestry
of ferns and ivies and blossoming vines. Even the roofs are covered with
flowers; every cranny bears a blossom or a tuft of green. Then above,
long stretches of barren heath (with a few twisted and wind-tortured
trees), where the sheep pasture and the sky-lark sings, and in and out
of the red-fronted cliffs the querulous sea-gulls flash in the sunshine,
and make their plaintive moan. Near Lynton there is the famous Valley of
Rocks, where the wise woman, _Mother Melldrum_, had her winter quarters
under the Devil's Cheese-wring.

[Illustration: xiv.jpg Cheese-wring]

The irregular pile of rocks that goes by this name is wrongly called
Cheese-_ring_ (or _scoop_) in some editions of "Lorna Doone," instead