"Trecarrel was, I hope, mistaken," urged Richard.
"I hope so, too."
Richard's face was pale, and to conceal his emotion, he stooped and caressed his favourite pointer, which had bounded in when the butler opened the door; and soon recovering from his little agitation—whatever its secret source might be—he politely and affectionately bade his uncle "good-bye for the present," nodded to the silent and observant Downie, took a double-barrelled breech-loader from the gun-room and sallied forth, unattended by game-keepers, desiring quite as much to indulge in reverie and enjoy a solitary ramble, as to have a shot at a passing bird.
To Richard it seemed that he had read a strangely keen, weird and unfathomable expression in his uncle's eyes, as they followed his departing steps on this particular morning—an expression which, somehow, haunted him.
The season, we have said, was now autumn, and a tender, mellow tone rested over all the landscape; Richard Trevelyan was fond of the strange, wild district—the land of old tradition, of bold and varied scenery—amid which his youth and so much of his manhood had been passed, and he looked around him from time to time with admiring eyes and an enthusiastic heart.
A soft warm shower had fallen that morning early, refreshing the fading September leaves in the belts of coppice that girt the upland slopes, and in the orchards, where the ripe golden apples were dropping amid the thick sward below. Above the purple, and often desolate moors which are so characteristic of Cornish scenery, and where the small breed of horses, the little black cattle and sharp-nosed sheep of the province were grazing, the wooded tors or hills stood boldly up in the distance, their foliage in most instances presenting many varied tints. There were the brown madder, the crisped chesnut, and the fading beech, the more faded green of the old Cornish elm, and the russet fern below, from amid which at every step he took the birds whirred up in coveys; while Richard, lost in reverie—the result of his uncle's remarks of late—never emptied a barrel at them, but walked slowly on looking round him from time to time, and filled with thoughts that were all his own as yet.
The place where he loitered was very lonely: here and there a gray lichen-spotted druidical monolith stood grimly up amid the silent waste; in the distance might be seen the gray expanse of the ocean, or some bleak looking houses slated with blue, as they usually are in Devon and Cornwall, or perhaps some of those poorer huts, which, like wigwams, have cob-walls; i.e. are built of earth, mud, and straw, beaten and pounded together, just as they might have been in the days of Bran the son of Llyr, or when Arthur dwelt in Tintagel.
Richard Trevelyan threw himself upon a grassy bank, and his pointer, doubtless surprised by his neglect of all sport, lay beside him with eyes of wonder and tongue out-lolled. In the distance, about a mile or so away, Trevelyan could see Rhoscadzhel House shining in the morning sunlight; and again, as on the preceding evening, he looked around with a bitter smile upon tor and moorland, and on the wondrous druid monoliths that stand up here and there on the bleak hill sides, each and all of them having their own quaint name and grim old legend.
How came each to be there? "Without patent rollers; nay, without the simplest mechanical contrivances of modern times, how was so huge a mass transported to yonder desolate and wind-swept height? How many yoke of oxen, how many straining scores of men must it have taken to erect the least of them! What submission to authority, what servile or superstitious fear must have animated the workers! No drover's whip would have urged to such a task; no richest guerdon could have repaid the toil; yet there the wonder stands!"
And some such thoughts as these floated through the mind of Richard, as his eyes wandered from a cromlech or slab that rested on three great stones, to a vast maen or rock-pillar, that might be coeval with the days when Jacob set up such a stone to witness his covenant with Laban.