The next morning, when the farmer’s men came down to the sands with their carts for the seaweed thrown up by the storm over night, they were astonished at beholding a face in the cliff’s overhead, and, standing out in the sea, crowned with screaming cormorants, and buffeted by the heavy waves, a tall pillar of rock which had not been there before.
I take this moving story as a warning to parish clubs to be careful in the selection of their vicars.
XXXVI.
From here it is a two miles’ walk along the sea-wall into Teignmouth. Time and again, in winter storms, hundreds of feet of massive masonry have been torn down, and often carried away bodily, by the sea, and on two or three occasions great landslips have occurred from the soaring red-sandstone cliffs overlooking the railway. Railway engineering here is no play.
“Teignmouth” (says my Bædeker) “is a large watering-place, prettily situated at the mouth of the Teign.” Thus far the guide-book. It is a peculiar feature of this class of literature that information is hurled at one’s head in stodgy lumps, in which are embedded measurements and statistics, enclosed in brackets sprinkled over the pages, like—like currants in a penny bun. Yet there are misguided folk who read guide-books continuously: these are people with an insatiable rage for general information, who spout dates at every turn.
RAILWAY AND SEA-WALL, NIGHT.
From East Cliff, Teignmouth