. The North Devon coast. a minute or twotogether, each ignoring the presence of the glanced a greatly impressed eye upon theshort, steep and slippery slope of grass that aloneintervened between his side of the seat and a sheerdrop of some two hundred feet into the sea. It would not be difficult to commit suicide here,he at length remarked. Was he wearied to extinction with his gout,and so determined here and now, to make anend ? Not at all : it was a purely speculativethought. The easiest thing in the world, I replied ; and one person might readily push anotherover, and no one Yes, ye
. The North Devon coast. a minute or twotogether, each ignoring the presence of the glanced a greatly impressed eye upon theshort, steep and slippery slope of grass that aloneintervened between his side of the seat and a sheerdrop of some two hundred feet into the sea. It would not be difficult to commit suicide here,he at length remarked. Was he wearied to extinction with his gout,and so determined here and now, to make anend ? Not at all : it was a purely speculativethought. The easiest thing in the world, I replied ; and one person might readily push anotherover, and no one Yes, yes, he rejoined with alacrity, andrelapsed into thoughtful silence a moment. Then,suddenly consulting his watch : Time I wasmoving off for lunch. Now I dont by any means, you know, regardmyself as a very desperate-looking person, yet ob-viously that unlucky remark moved that nervousold gentleman to go off in quest of his lunch at avery early hour. I suppose he imagined himselfto have experienced a very narrow escape. One. THE VALLEY OF ROCKS 49 does read such dreadful things in the papers,I hear him, in imagination, saying at lunch ; you never know what lunatic you may meet insome lonely spot. True. And so, into the Valley of Rocks. There wasa time when every writer who happened upon theValley of Rocks felt himself obliged to adopt anattitude of awe, and to ransack the dictionaryfor adjectives to fitly represent the complicatedstate of mind into which he generally lashedhimself. That time has naturally been succeededby a revulsion of feeling ; and there is not a guide-book at the present day which does not apologisefor those old transports of feeling, and declarethe Valley of Rocks to be really nothing remark-able. But that later attitude is just as absurdas the earlier. The valley is very fine indeed,and its wildness is only impaired by the broadwhite ribbon of road that runs through it, andwill not let you forget that here, too, howevercraggy and precipitous the piled-up masse
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