She does not give the name of this strange "ffowle," but Lundy is no unfitting habitat for an amphibious creature which is at least as rare as the Dodo.

Stories of Henry de Tracy, who murdered Thomas a Becket, are numerous up and down the coast; for the Tracys owned a considerable amount of property here—Lynton, Crinton, Countisbury, and Parracombe—and, in spite of historical evidence of the family's continued prosperity, tradition asserts that the curse brought down by sacrilege was fulfilled, and that Henry de Tracy wanders up and down these desolate coves, condemned to weave ropes of sand that can never draw his wretched soul out of torment till the last trump shall sound. He has become, indeed, a figure of legend, merged with such strange persons as the Wandering Jew and all those restless and unreleased spirits who, like Sisyphus of Greek legend or Tregeagle of Cornish, for ever toil at a for ever unaccomplished task.

The legends which have sprung up round the name of Coppinger have been of quick growth, for "Cruel Coppinger" was a Danish sea-captain who was wrecked off Hartland at the end of the eighteenth century. He came naked ashore, the only survivor from the ship, having swum through the stormy waves. He staggered up the beach, seized the red cloak from an old woman's shoulders, wrapped himself in it, and leapt on the horse of a young girl who stood by, urged the horse into a gallop, and disappeared from the beach. That was a sufficiently striking entrance to the stage of Devon, and he filled his part adequately. The young girl with whom he had ridden off was Dinah Hamlyn; he was taken by her to her father's farm, where he was fed and clothed. He married Dinah, and after her father's death, within a year, he ill-treated shamefully her and her mother, though it was to them that he practically owed his life, ship-wrecked strangers in the eighteenth century being apt to disappear among an inhospitable people. Coppinger lived by smuggling and wrecking; he was brave, violent, and of great physical strength, and he terrorized the population of these little villages by acts of savagery and cruelty. A ganger who had had the boldness to interfere with him he seized, and beheaded on the gunnel of his own boat, and even for this no one dared to bring him to justice. He played violent practical jokes, by inviting to dinner with him unfortunate people who dared not refuse, and serving them up cats or offal for their meal.

He was in every way a scoundrel and a blackguard, and became such a pest that at last he earned retribution; and after many local attempts to convict him of smuggling or wrecking, the revenue officers came out from Bude to the Bristol Channel to hunt him down. He was seen last on the Gull Rock, off Hartland Point, signalling one evening to a ship which lay in the offing. He was taken off by a boat, but almost immediately a storm came up, the ship was blotted out from the sight of those watching from the cliffs, and when the squall passed she had totally disappeared. No one ever knew whether she had foundered with all hands, or had run out of sight behind Lundy, or whether she had become, by reason of the wicked wretch aboard her, a second Flying Dutchman, shaping an endless course through stormy seas.

There is a verse of rough doggerel which the children in these parts still repeat, and which embodies the story of this tyrant:

"Will you hear of cruel Coppinger? He came from a foreign land; He was brought to us by the salt water, He was carried away by the wind."

Probably Coppinger's wild and picturesque rush from the beach, like a Centaur in a scarlet cloak, was an actual measure of prudence; for in those cruel times of wreckers and smugglers the survivors who landed from a wreck were often murdered by the people they were thrown amongst, because "dead men tell no tales," and the unfortunate seamen might otherwise give evidence of false lights which had seemed to promise safety and refuge, and had drawn them on to the rocks. Such was the case of a French ship which was drawn ashore at Hele by wreckers, and the only survivor was taken to Champernownesheyes (the old gabled farmhouse which was formerly the home of the well-known Devonshire family of Champernowne), and there murdered. There is a curious ghost-story told in connection with this: The farm in due time passed into other hands, and all memory of the wreck or the disappearance of the one unfortunate survivor was lost. But one evening, while the farmer who was then living at Champernownesheyes was smoking his pipe in the garden, he fell to idly counting the windows, and, having done this several times, he discovered that there was one window unaccounted for. He called his wife, and then the servants, and, having made sure of this, they located the position of the strange window, and, going upstairs, they broke down the wall which they judged to be opposite, and found, indeed, that the window lighted a small room, furnished in sixteenth-century style, and containing a bed, hung with mouldering tapestry, on which lay a skeleton—the bones of the shipwrecked survivor who had been murdered. As they broke into the room, and went to fling open the long-closed window, they heard a great rushing noise, and cries and groans, and they declared that the garden was filled with evil spirits, rustling and whispering, mopping and mowing, for upwards of an hour afterwards.

There are, of course, many more tales, legends, and traditions, than I have been able to deal with in the space of one chapter; every village has them, every cove and creek, dark wooded hollow, or twisted and fantastic rock, and to collect and collate, to sift and inquire into all the wealth of folk-lore that our country still holds would be an attractive but a life-long work. All I have attempted to give in these few pages is some general idea of the intimate life of these country-folk, what beliefs and customs, inherited often from the days before Christianity, what charms and legends and lore, go to the fashioning of their minds, just as I have tried to give a general idea of the beauty and wildness, the peculiar and intimate quality, of the country in which they live.

THE END