However that may be, there is no questioning the popularity of Labrador, where teas are provided and swings tempt the giddy-minded, and roses clamber over the house-front in a manner suggestive of Persia and Omar Khayyàm. Why, with leisure—and genius—one might compose another Rabaiyat when the tea-takers were gone.
“I reckon,” says one of the soil, whom we meet here and exchange remarks with, “Twize up and down es a gude day’s work,” and it really is a leg-aching job to climb to the top of the cliff, which must be done to gain the Torquay road. South Devon is sleepy, and, experiencing this steepest of paths and hottest of hot corners, the stranger is not surprised. At any time it is possible to sit down and drop into a “bit of a zog”—which is Devonian for a nap.
The Torquay road is inexorably hilly and white and hot, but it looks inland down on to samples of Canaan, where, amid a blue haze of fertility, you see trees and grass more nearly blue than green, among the freshly turned fields that are red. It is a land of fatness. There, down in those folded valleys, is a distant glimpse of the Teign, with the white-faced, yellow-thatched cottages of “Stokeintinny” and “Cumeintinny” enwrapped in an air of prosperity; and here is the ridge-road, like an oven. “Aw! my dear sawls, ’tes tar’ble hot.”
Here stands the old toll-house the country folk call “Solomon’s Post”; but why? Ah! he who pervades the country asking for the reasons of things is not to be envied. For my part, the likeliest reason of this name is that the tolls on this turnpike-trust may have been farmed by one of those numerous Jews who took up that class of business.
Lanes on the left-hand presently lead down to Minnicombe and Maidencombe, where there are embowered hamlets giving upon the sea; and in another mile yet another leads down to Watcombe. Watcombe is not what it was fifteen years ago. Then a countryfied lane opened out upon a grassy valley dropping to the sea. From the turf there soared aloft the ruddiest of all the ruddy cliffs of South Devon, seamed and seared with the weathering of ages, and as thickly pocketed with holes as a Post Office poste-restante rack. The cliff is there, as ever, and the holes, and the pigeons and jackdaws that inhabit them, but the undergrowth has grown up in dense and tangled masses everywhere, the hedges of the rustic lane have given place to stone walls, and all the pleasant approaches are enclosed in the grounds of somebody’s private domain. Confound Somebody, say I: may the dogs defile the grave of his great-great-grandmother. But let us take these outrages as calmly as we may, or not seek to further explore; for the approach to Torquay through Babbacombe and Marychurch is a perfect orgie of Wall. It must have been a difficult and an expensive matter to so successfully shut out the scenery, but it has been so thoroughly done that when you do at last come to the cliff-top of Babbacombe Downs, the lovely clear outlook there over the sea and down to the beach seems, by contrast, like a hole in the wall.
But we anticipate, as the authors of Early Victorian novels were accustomed to remark, and have not finished with Watcombe, which is remarkable for having supplied the Romans with potters’-clay and for providing us moderns with the same material. The Watcombe Terracotta Works, that stand by the high road, were established somewhere about 1875. Their products of statuettes for advertising purposes are sufficiently well-known, and I dare not hazard a guess how many of that famous group, “You Dirty Boy!” the works produced for an eminent firm of soap-makers. When what has been called the “Æsthetic Craze” set in, and all manner of weird wares, alleged to have some “Art” quality, were thrust upon the public, the Watcombe terracottas were fashioned in the most awkward and “artistic” shapes, and painted with sunflowers and the most abhorrent colours, and in them that good, long-suffering public for a time found artistic salvation. But that was long ago, and the sunflower has wilted and the lily faded away. To-day, rustic humour and Old English models combined, capture the tourist. Puzzle-jugs and scraps of country talk find the readiest sale, and many a holiday-maker takes home with him butter-dishes, jugs, and plates with such legends as “Go aisy with the butter,” “Help yo’self to some Demsher crayme,” or that noble triolet—
“Du zummat,
Du gude ef yo can,
Du zummat.”