IV 

 A WAR MEMORY 



THOUGHTS of North Devon bring back 

 other memories, of a day when a long 

 swell was coming in from seawards, a sure 

 sign of some disturbance in the west. The 

 Emerald Isle does not intervene between Devon 

 and America. There is only the open Atlantic, 

 where our common ancestors, the Elizabethan 

 seamen of old, went Westward Ho ! to fight 

 for the true freedom of the seas against the 

 Spaniard. Charles Kingsley, from our little 

 picnic beach, used to gaze across that western 

 sea. His monument stands nearby, at Bide- 

 ford. It was from this very beach, or close to 

 it, that he stepped into the Clovelly trawler's 

 boat and held forth upon things seen and unseen 

 to his artist friend " Claud Mellot." It may 

 have been here, too, that he wrote, as I am 

 writing now, " Westward Ho ! we have pros- 

 pered." Soon, on the day of my remembrance, 

 white horses began to show on the long Atlantic 



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