Curtis May.

'ARLY one June I made a coaching tour along the coast of North Devon. It is a lonely region of great hills and deep valleys, and the railroad goes no farther than Minehead, in Somersetshire. There, in the afternoon, toward train time, many cabs, coaches, and other conveyances gather at the edge of the station platform. The most imposing of these vehicles on the day I left the train at Minehead was a coach with four horses attached and the name "Lorna Doone" painted in large letters on its rear. The coach was in charge of an aristocratic-looking driver in buff uniform and a low black stovepipe hat, with a less elaborate footman for an assistant. My traps, along with a lot of others, were hustled inside the Lorna Doone, and a mountainous pile of larger luggage was heaped up and strapped on top. Then a ladder was set against the side of the coach, the passengers climbed to their places, the driver picked up his lines, the footman swung up to the rear seat and merrily sounded a long horn, and away we went with the horn repeating itself at intervals through the Minehead streets.

Such a ride has a touch of romance and power about it that thrills and inspires one. We looked down on everything and everybody. All the teams on the road gave way to us. When we sighted a vehicle, no matter

which way it was going, the footman played one of his little tunes on the long horn and the humbler conveyance drew off by the roadside while we dashed by.

Our first few miles lay through rich farm lowlands, but when we reached Porlock the driver said we had a bit of steep road ahead and asked the men of the coach to walk. The name "Porlock" seemed like an echo from the pages of Lorna Doone. It was from this town that John Ridd's father set out on the night of his fatal encounter with the Doones, and it is often mentioned in Blackmore's story. After leaving the town we began the ascent of what proved to be a three-mile hill -a climb of some fourteen hundred feet. The country on the way up had turned to a barren heath of rolling hills that swept away southward as far as the eye could reach. This barren heath is Exmoor Forest. It is the only region in England where the red deer is still found wild, a reminder of those rough times when the "red deer" were hunted by the Doones in the intervals of less innocent expeditions, and of Annie's delicious cookery of "red deer collops," which captured the hearts of all men,-of the king's soldiers and of the counselor of the Doones alike. The Forest is still a famous hunting-ground and hundreds of horsemen gather at the stag meets.

The wind blew a hurricane on this hilltop and we were all glad when, a little farther on, we sighted a group of farm buildings and then drew up in the lee of a stone barn to change horses. An old lady from the house brought out tea and a platter of buttered bread, which the passengers sipped and munched on the coach top.

The rest of the journey was nearly all downhill and much of the way we slipped along with a clog under the hind wheel. At one point the driver called our attention to a distant depression in the heath where a momentary gleam of sunshine from the clouded sky touched with emerald a fragment of woodland, and said there lay Doone Valley. It was far inland and this was the only glimpse of it we had that day, for the coach was bound for two villages on the coast. In the

last few miles we looked down on a white-capped sea with a few little vessels struggling along in it, while far across its level in the west the sun glared from among the clouds. The coast was wild and high-cliffed, with many bold headlands reaching out from the main.

Our road skirted a steep hillside that fell away almost from the wheel track in a tremendous precipice to the surf of the shore deep down below. On the heather heights we had crossed I had been afraid the top-heavy coach would be tipped over by the wind; now I feared it would get dumped down the hillside by a jolt or a swing round a turn in the road. At last we slid down into the slippery shadows of the trees in the valley, and across the stone arch of a bridge, the horn sounded and there we were in Lyn