TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Original spelling and punctuation has been retained, with a few exceptions. Some quotation mark errors have been fixed.

On page 51, the passage "to the deer-haunted heights of Dunkerry" is retained. "Dunkery" occurs four times in the book; "Dunkerry" once.

IN THE WEST COUNTRY
by Francis A. Knight.

CLOVELLY FROM THE SEA. [ ImagesList]

In the West Country

BY

FRANCIS A. KNIGHT,

AUTHOR OF

"By Leafy Ways," "Rambles of a Dominie," "By Moorland and Sea," &c., &c.

ILLUSTRATED.

Bristol:
W. CROFTON HEMMONS, ST. STEPHEN STREET.

London:
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd.

These sketches are, with alterations and additions, reprinted from the "Daily News" and the "Speaker," by kind permission of the editors.

WITHOUT PERMISSION,
BUT WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE
TOO DEEP FOR WORDS,

These Pages are Dedicated

TO
THE DEVOTED COMPANION
WHOSE RAMBLES WITH ME IN

The West Country

BEGAN NOW NEARLY

". . . five and twenty years ago;
Alas, but time escapes! 'Tis even so."

Printed at the Publisher's Works, St. Stephen Street, Bristol.

[ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.]

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

AT CLOVELLY.

[toc]

There are few parts of English coast-line whose traditions are more picturesque than those of the beautiful sea-board of Devon. Its shores are haunted by memories of the great Armada, of the deeds of Drake and Hawkins, of Howard and Raleigh, and of many another old sea-dog, who played his part in the making of our island story. It was the coast of Devonshire that was first harried by the Danes, when, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, "three ships of Northmen, out of Denmark," put in to plunder Teignmouth. The other side of the county suffered most. Again and again the hamlets on the northern shore were wasted by the merciless invaders. The isle of Lundy, that from the land shows like a faint blue bar along the sky line, has a stirring story of its own. It has served in its time as a stronghold even of corsair Algerines. Pirates from Spain and Holland each held it in their turn. On the beach of its only landing place there still lies, buried in the shingle, an ancient gun that was hurled over the cliff by the French when they were about to leave the island. Its rightful lords themselves were, in the good old days, little better, probably, than buccaneers.

But there is a greater and more real interest linked with this pleasant shore. The memory that, before all others, haunts the coast of Devon is the memory of Charles Kingsley. The legends that have most charm for us here are from the pages of "Westward Ho!" If Bideford has regained nothing of its lost renown, Bideford that in Queen Bess's time "was one of the chief ports in England … furnished seven ships to fight the Armada; and even more than a century afterwards … sent more vessels to the northern trade than any port in England saving London and Topsham," we cannot forget that it was there that "Westward Ho!" was written. As we stroll along the streets of the little seaport that lies opposite, we are less likely to think of Hubba and his vikings than of how "the Vengeance slid over the Bar, passed the sleeping sandhills, and dropped anchor off Appledore with her flag floating half-mast high, for the corpse of Salvation Yeo was on board."

Kingsley's pictures of South American forests have fired the heart of many a reader, old as well as young, to see for himself the wonders of those enchanted regions, to gaze on a giant ceiba tree, like that on the green steeps above La Guayra, where "Parrots peeped in and out of every cranny, while, within the air of woodland, brilliant lizards basked like living gems upon the bark, gaudy finches flitted and chirrupped, butterflies of every size and colour hovered over the topmost twigs, innumerable insects hummed from morn till eve; and, when the sun went down, tree-toads came out to snore and croak till dawn."

But those descriptions, marvellous as they are, were borrowed from books. It was not until fourteen years after that passage was written that "the dream of forty years" was fulfilled; that the author of "At Last" was able to see with his own eyes the West Indies and the Spanish Main; could, as he says, "compare books with facts, and judge for myself of the reported wonders of the earthly paradise." But it is quite another thing when he is talking of the coast of Devon. There his foot is on his native heath. He was not, it is true, born within sound of the sea, but some of his earliest memories were of Hartland and Welcombe, of Bideford and Clovelly. Above all of Clovelly. To use his wife's words, "His love for Clovelly was a passion." Even his well-loved Eversley had hardly a warmer place in his regard.

Kingsley was just eleven when his father became rector there, and for some six years he doubtless spent most of his holidays at least among the scenes which he describes so well. Thirteen years passed before he went back. "I cannot believe my eyes," he wrote to his wife; "the same place, the pavement, the same dear old smells, the dear old handsome, loving faces again." The cottages are much the same as when last he saw them, now nearly fifty years ago, "with jessamine and fuchsia running up the windows." Just the same as then is "the narrow paved cranny of a street, vanishing downwards, stair below stair." Any change there is must be for the better. The village has been drained; that is a substantial improvement, and the fuchsias and climbers have wreathed half the hamlet in a very bower of green. Clovelly Church—so far away that the sound of its bells never reaches the village in the cleft below—has few features of its own to recommend it. But the grey-haired sexton remembers how he sat with young Kingsley in the choir, sixty years since, when they were boys together. And the churchyard is to us like a chapter of romance. Half the names we know best in "Westward Ho!" are on its stones.

Here are two names that conjure up those "five desperate minutes" on the mountain road when the gold train was taken; when the surviving Spaniards, "two only, who were behind the rest, happening to be in full armour, escaped without mortal wound, and fled down the hill again." They were chased by "Michael Evans and Simon Heard … two long and lean Clovelly men … who ran two feet for the Spaniards' one; and in ten minutes returned, having done their work." Another stone reminds us of "the armourer, who sat tinkering a head-piece," humming a ballad in honour of his birthplace. "'Tis Sunderland, John Squire, to the song, and not Bidevor," said his mate. "Well, Bidevor's as good as Sunderland any day, for all there's no say-coals there blacking a place about."

The names of Ebbsworthy and Parracombe recall that scene by the banks of the Meta, when Amyas went with Ayacanora in search of two of his men, who had taken to the forest, each with an Indian bride. It was Parracombe who asked only to be left "in peace, alone with God and God's woods, and the good wives that God has given us, to play a little like school children. It's long since I've had play-hours, and now I'll be a little child once more, with the flowers and the singing birds and the silver fishes in the stream that are at peace and think no harm, and want neither clothes, nor money, nor knighthood, nor peerage, but just take what comes."

Here are Yeo and Hamblyn. And if there are no Careys in the churchyard, they lie in plenty in the church itself. Here, too, is a Passmore. "Lucy Passmore, the white witch to Welcombe. Don't you mind Lucy Passmore, as charmed your warts for you when you was a boy?" It is a far cry from Clovelly to the deep gorge of Welcombe: a good way even to Harty Point, with whose lesser altitude the crew of the Rose compared the towering heights above the mangrove swamps of Higuerote. But the place is close to the village where Frank and Amyas kept watch after that strange missive had been left at the Court by some "country fellow"—

"Mister Carey, be you wary

By deer park end to-night

Yf Irish ffoxe com out of rocks

Grip and hold hym tight"

We can stand there now and look out over just such a scene as Amyas saw when, "outside, the south-west wind blew fresh and strong, and the moonlight danced upon a thousand crests of foam; but within the black, jagged point which sheltered the town, the sea did but heave in long, oily swells of rolling silver, onward into the black shadow of the hills, within which town and pier lay invisible, save where a twinkling light gave token of some weary fisher's wife, watching the weary night through for the boat which would return with dawn."

The beech below, the "steep hillside fenced with oak wood," are at least the same as in Kingsley's time. And if the stout craft that he used to watch putting out from the pier have not outlived the gales of half a century, there are men on the fishing boats of to-day that remember him well. There are those in the village who recollect even his father, "a man who feared no danger, and could steer a boat, hoist and lower a sail, shoot a herring net, and haul a seine as one of themselves." Who that stands looking seaward from the ancient quay, whose rude, unmortared masonry has weathered full five hundred winters, and watches the great green rollers thundering up the beach, but thinks of the bay as Kingsley saw it, "darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock than the pitiless, howling waste of spray behind them?" Yes, it is "Westward Ho!" country. Turn where we will—the bay, the cliffs, the woods, the village—all remind us of Amyas Leigh, of Will Carey, of Salvation Yeo.

THE SOUND OF THE SEA.

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The long curve of the shore on either side this little fishing port, guarded here by a mighty wall of cliff, here by steep faces of red rock, and bordered here with fields that come down nearly to the water's edge, is fringed with a wide belt of shingle—no smooth stretch of yellow sand, but miles and miles of great grey pebbles, the ruins of old cliffs, the wreck of rocky battlements shattered by the surges, and rolled and shaped and rounded by the rude play of winds and waves. Down the long shore, headland beyond headland shows fainter and more faint, until the shadowy outline of the land fades into the far horizon. Westward from the harbour, a long cliff towers above the shore, with strange curves and mighty buttresses, of endless shades of red and brown, its seaworn faces weathered to cool grey or stained to inky black, touched with the gold of clinging lichens and the bright green of tiny ferns. Along its ledges sturdy rowan trees are rooted, among thickets of gorse and bracken and heather. Higher up there hangs over the rocky brows a crown of dwarf oak trees, gnarled and storm-beaten.

At the foot of the vast wall, growing dim now as evening darkens, is a little space of shingle-covered beach, that at high water is altogether shut out from the world. When the tide is in there is no way in or out. If on the steep side of the cliff there are tracks up which a goat might clamber, yet round the points of rock that fence it in, against which now the waves are breaking, there will be no way for hours. For hours nor voice nor foot of man can break the quiet of this lonely spot. A single gull, rocking idly on the waves, over its double in the clear water under it, and one solitary cormorant standing erect and motionless on a great rock that is almost as dark as he, deepen the sense of solitude. Solitude there is, but not silence. The warm air of the summer twilight is full of the sound of the sea—"low at times, and loud at times, and changing like a poet's rhymes;" and after each wave-beat on the storm-worn rocks the dark cliff overhead so flings back the answer that it seems as if

"From each cave and rocky fastness,

In its vastness,

Floats some fragment of a song"

The hour is late. The cliff grows cold and sombre. Darkness is settling in its cavernous hollows. The shadow of the shore steals slowly out over the pale green sea. Over the bay are scattered the fishing-boats of the port, still far off, but making for home towards the tiny quay that, from the shore below the village, stretches out its sheltering arm. Far out at sea, beyond the jagged line of tumbling waves against the sky, lies a great ocean highway, whose white sails and drifting smoke show faintly through the haze. Over the vast sea, here dark with shifting cloud-shadows, there still bright in the clear sunshine, are hues a painter might toil for in vain. Who could render the swift changes of colour that wind and sun are weaving with their magical loom over the wide expanse? Here a band of pale, clear green stretches far across the bay; here a belt of soft amber; there a long stretch of rich, imperial purple, with endless interchange of brown and green and blue, ruffled with light flaws of wind, and touched at far intervals with white points of foam, as of waves that were fleeing from the rougher sea outside.

The art of man might copy to the life the curve of that great green wave, with scraps of seaweed showing darkly through its cool, transparent depths; but not the deftest hand that ever drew could give the low roar of the incoming roller, the sound of its plunge on the unyielding rock. The painter might imitate the snowy whiteness of the water beaten suddenly into foam, but not its seething hiss as it rushes in among the boulders, not the rattle of the pebbles as the wave draws back for its next plunge along the beach. He might show us the glisten of the wet stones, rounded and polished by the eternal chafing of the surges; he might make the white foam flicker in the black shadows under them, but not the sullen sound of boulders shaken to their stony roots by the resistless tide—boulders that on rough nights of winter, when the lighthouse tower is veiled in storm-drift, and great waves are thundering on the bar, are hurled like play-things up and down the beach. The cormorant on the canvas might be to the full as stately and sombre as that dark figure yonder, brooding like some spirit of evil; but no shout could startle him to flight, driving him, with slow beat of his broad wings, to seek safety in some still more secluded resting-place. The clearest colours of the palette, the deftest touches of the brush, the highest ideal of the painter can give us but one glimpse of what after all is one unending change. His may be the ideal. This is the real, the restless, seething, stormy sea. What is the sea without its sound? As we gaze at the dumb fury of a painted storm—the fatal reef, the doomed ship, the white lash of the pitiless surges, it is to Fancy alone that we must look for

"The sound of the trampling surf

On the rocks and the hard sea sand."

But now the fishing-boats are coming in. Their brown sails, always so dear to the soul of the artist, have taken colour from the flaming west, and shine like fiery orange in the light of sunset. Their dark hulls are glistening with spray, the white foam shines like silver underneath their bows. One after one they near the shore, and as they pass into the shadow of the cliff the silver melts from the hissing foam below them, the borrowed colour fades slowly from their sails, that, as each craft reaches her moorings, rattle down, mere heaps of sombre, sea-beaten canvas. Boats are putting out from the shore to bring in the fish. Groups of idlers and fishing-folk gather on the quay. For the moment the hum of voices rises louder through the narrow street of the little town, half hidden now in the darkness of the hollow—the little town that is like no other in the islands.

"'Tis a stairway, not a street.

That ascends the deep ravine."

The sun is down. Far off across the bay the lighthouse has mounted guard over the bar,—the very bar over which

"Three fishers went sailing away to the west,

Away to the west as the sun went down."

Now silence begins to settle on the village. The bearded vikings are gone from the seat where, night after night, they spin the same old yarns; where night after night the wayfarer over-hears scraps of seafaring talk—of prodigious hauls of fish, of hairbreadth escapes, of trawlers that, fleeing from a storm, were caught on the very threshold and dashed to flinders on the quay.

A sound of the sea is in it all. And when the last group of idlers has broken up, when the clatter of the last belated footsteps has died away up the little, unlighted, stony street, and the hush of night is brooding on this quaint old village, the song of the sea grows louder still. Now through the quiet air comes faintly up the cry of some wandering plover, the muttered croak of a solitary heron. All night the little town is full of voices of the sea—

"The grand, majestic symphonies of ocean.

THE VIKINGS SEAT.

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Half way down the one street of this "little wood-embosomed fishing town—a steep stair of houses clinging to the cliff," as Kingsley calls it, is one of the few level spaces that break the otherwise abrupt descent. No better place could have been chosen for a seat, for no point in all the village commands so wide a view of the sea. There is no place so good as this for watching the trawlers putting out, hauled slowly to the head of the quay, and then spreading their great brown mainsails,—double-reefed of late, for there is mostly a stiff breeze outside the bay. On the left, in front of one of the prettiest of many pretty houses in the village, half covered with a bower of creepers, is a low wall, on which, when their day's work is done, the sailors and the old sea captains gather for their nightly gossip. Below are groups of cottages, scattered in picturesque confusion, with ancient roofs of crumbling slate, and quaint old gables, all wreathed in creepers and honeysuckle and tall fuchsias. Lower still is the old quay, five centuries old, with brown fishing nets hung up to dry, and with a half-score or so of trawlers moored to old corroded guns embedded in the masonry, their tall masts swaying idly on the long swell that now, at high tide, fills the little harbour. The fishermen are still busy over their gear. When all is stowed they will make their way up here, to the wall yonder, or to this bench, to talk over the doings of the day. Here the old captains, grey-headed, storm-beaten sea kings, sit, night after night, and spin over and over their well-worn yarns. There is not so much in their speech of

". . the magic charm of foreign lands,

With shadows of palms, and shining sands;"

not so much of the high seas,

"Of ships dismasted, that were hailed,

And sent no answer back again,"

as of disasters nearer home, of some mishap among the boats.

It is always the boats. The talk is ever and ever the same—of spars carried away, of split mainsails, of the failure of the fishing. A few days since the trawlers put out with a fair wind and a smooth sea. The trawls were not yet down when clouds swept off the land, the air was darkened by a great rush of rain, and a sudden storm, with heavy squalls of wind, broke over the boats. One by one the brown sails disappeared. On the quay stood a group of anxious figures vainly endeavouring to peer through the storm. When the weather cleared it was seen that one of the boats was in trouble. A squall had laid her on her beam ends, and she shipped a heavy sea. The men had given themselves up for lost, for no help could have got to them in time, even had their plight been seen; when, happily for them, the bowsprit carried away, some of the strain was taken off, and the boat righted. All next day her skipper was strolling idly on the quay, like a man dazed; and as you pass the Vikings' Seat in the evening, or indeed any little knot of sailors, you will still hear scraps of the story.

The gravestones round the church on the hill are evidence enough of the risks they run that go down to the sea in ships. More eloquent still are the tales of the old fishermen:—how, for instance, in one great storm, now "five-and-fifty years agone," as they put it, twenty-one men from this port were drowned in the bay, within sight of land. Still farther back, "a matter of one-and-seventy years agone," no fewer than thirty-two were lost; and the whole population of the port is even now not much over two hundred. Of such great disasters the churchyard has few records. So strong are the currents in the bay that bodies are seldom recovered. Some of the stones are only in memory of those whose rest remains unknown—not here, but somewhere in the stormy sea.

Every son of the village is a fisherman born. Every man has been a sailor almost since he could remember anything. Few as are the inhabitants of the place, twenty of them are captains on the high seas, or, having spent their lives in battling with the storm, have put in for the last time to spend in this harbour of refuge their few remaining days. These are the men of the old school, who, from childhood to old age, have kept green the memory of their native village, always cherishing the hope

". . . . . . their long vexations past,

Here to return, and die at home at last."

The modern captain is a more prosperous man. He knows more of the world. He is not content with the narrow street, the tiny rooms, the small affairs of this awkward out-of-the-way corner. His home will be at some larger port. In twenty years there will be few of the old race of sea captains left to rule the conclaves round the Vikings' Seat.

They are a kindly race, those West Country fishermen. Kingsley's eulogies of his beloved Devon folk were never more deserved than here, never were more true than now:—a warm-hearted, honest, pleasant-spoken race, gentle and courteous, yet free and independent as ever. A fine old figure is that venerable, white-headed, white-bearded mariner, whose memories go back over eighty years of seafaring life. He is never tired of the story of a sailor of this village, who, returning home in a gold-ship, was cast away on Norfolk Island—then entirely uninhabited—together with his wife and a handful of the crew. The men saved nothing from the wreck but one precious lucifer match, parent of all the fires they had in many dreary years. Some of the party, in despair, put off in a boat, but nothing was ever known as to their fate. Years passed before a sealing brig put in and took off the few survivors. The portrait of the castaway and his wife, in their rude dress of skins, sewn with bone needles of their own making, is still shewn in the village—he, with lifted hand, as if pointing to the long-looked-for sail; she, with a bright look of joy upon her pretty face.

The white-haired sailor, for all his eighty years of sailing, has never been out of sight of land; but that tall, grizzled sea captain standing yonder has been round the Horn more times than he can well reckon up. After forty years he came home, with every intention of getting another ship, feeling that nothing could ever part him from the sea. But the years have passed, and still he lingers in the village. Nothing now could tempt him from the shore. Of all the wonders of his forty years' experience, none seems to have burnt itself so deep into his memory as a night in the tropics, in a perfect calm, on a smooth and oily sea, in which all the stars were copied with such perfect clearness that, as he puts it, "you would almost think there really was another world, and that you were in it."

In a doorway hard by, festooned after the manner of the place with creepers and tall fuchsias, is a picture for an artist. At the threshold there sits, on the brick-floor, the grandfather, an old, sunburnt, sea-beaten fisherman, nursing a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked youngster, who laughs and crows and struggles to escape the old man's careful arm, bent on setting off alone on a voyage of discovery down the stony slope. Behind them, framed in the darkness of the room beyond, stands the mother, looking on well pleased.

OLD SAILOR AND CHILD. [ImagesList]

What have the years in store for that young fisherman? Will his grave be here? Will days that are coming see one more stone set up in memory of a sailor lost at sea? Perhaps not. As one of the old captains says, "Boys don't take to the sea now. Going to be artists. Learn to draw and all manner of things." In his time "the schoolmaster was a very different sort from now. He had to be a schoolmaster, land-measurer, pig-killer, all in one. You paid three halfpence a week for learning to read, three halfpence more for learning to write, and then you went to sea. Boys all went to sea at twelve. They had their choice—work or starve." Sailors of his day had rarely even as much schooling as that. He had never, he said, courted but one woman in his life, and that was for another man. He had had so much trouble reading and writing other folks' love-letters that he never had the heart to try it for himself.

Round the Vikings' Seat the children of the village are playing. Hard by, on a tiny stretch of level ground, half-a-dozen boys are intent on some running game—nautical little figures in regulation jerseys; sea boots too, some of them. Where will they be in twenty years? If they are not to man the trawlers of the future there is all the more chance that they will be scattered. If they are not to be fishermen, there is no room for them here. Here there is nothing but the fishing.

And the girls? These laughing, sunny, bright-eyed little flowers of Devon, absorbed in an old-world country game, singing as they play—

"How many miles to London town?

Three score ten.

Shall us get there by candle light?

Oh yes, if your legs are long and straight."

What of the girls? Below there, sleeping in the twilight, is the sea, the cruel, treacherous, hungry sea, destined but too surely to darken the sunshine of their simple lives. That small figure now, that dainty little golden-haired darling, for her what have the years in store? In days to be will she

". . . . start from her slumber

When gusts shake the door?"

Will she make her way against the storm, some winter's night, down to the little quay, and peer with wild eyes through the rain and the spray, amid a roar of wind and surge, and of great waves thundering on the bar, hoping against hope for the home-coming of the Madcap or the Village Girl? What would you? It is an old story, and

". . men must work and women must weep,

Though the harbour bar be moaning."

AN OLD CARRONADE.

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Half-buried in the soft turf that clothes the rocky brows of a low headland in the West there lies an ancient carronade. It is a quiet spot. There is no sound save the lap of the tide along the shore, the stir of the wind in the long grass, the cry of a sea-gull wheeling over, or now and then the sharp clamour of a troop of daws that flutter round their harbour in the cliff. About it grow great tufts of sea-pink, whose flowers, save here and there a belated bloom or two, have long since gone to seed. But in summer the air is sweetened by the breath of thyme and crowfoot, and at times, from the rocky steeps below, comes the strange smell of blossoming samphire. There is no mark on the old gun. The rust of years has eaten deep into its battered metal. No date remains, no royal cipher. But there is a tradition that it was recovered from the wreck of a Spanish warship that, in the flight of the Armada, went to pieces on this rock-bound coast. In the face of the cliff, a few hundred yards to the westward, there were found embedded, many years ago, some corroded cannon-balls that once might have fitted such a gun as this, but surrounded by so thick a coat of rust that they were increased to nearly four times their original calibre. The gun has at any rate seen some hard fighting. It has been spiked. Some part at least it has played in our rough island story, whether on pirate or privateer, or on one of the unwieldy galleons of the Great Armada. But as it lies here now, deep sunk in its green rest, it is a very emblem of peace and of disarmament.

The tide is at the full, almost "too full for sound or foam;" yet along the broad beach below,

". . . . . where the sand like silver shines,

Flows the long, monotonous cadence of its unrhymed lyric lines."

And round the rocky bases of the little island yonder—once, so tradition says, a Viking stronghold—there is the low fret of pale green waves. Beyond the island stretches away to the horizon a vast sweep of sea, smooth, unbroken; an expanse of vivid blue, more brilliant than the brightest sapphire. But

"When descends on the Atlantic

The gigantic

Storm-wind of the equinox,"

then the huge green rollers come charging up this narrow strait, and thunder in the caverns of the cliff, whirling great flakes of foam a hundred feet into the air. They are gentle waves that lap to-day against the rocky wall. But there is no stormier sea when, on rough nights of winter,

"The wild winds lift it in their grasp,
And hold it up, and shake it like a fleece."

A few brown-sailed luggers are cruising in the bay,—mackerel fishing perhaps. The pilchards have deserted this coast altogether. Some of the men say that the constant passing of steamers has disturbed them. Others declare "there have been no pilchards since the new parson came, and there'll be none till he's turned his back on the parish."

On the verge of the next headland, a rampart of grey cliff that stands out towards the open Atlantic, are two great grave mounds, mere flaws on the horizon's edge, piled over the ashes of some long-forgotten warriors. There is a legend here that, at midnight, two kings in golden armour rise from these green barrows, and fight on the short sward of the downs until the lighthouse on the far point

". . . shows the matin to be near.

And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire."

Then the old sea-kings turn back to their rest, to lie till nightfall, each

"Arched over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass."

On a ledge of rock below the barrows, a pair of ravens build. Year after year their brood is reared in safety, beyond the reach even of the most venturesome of climbers. The old birds patrol the cliff for miles, like wandering spirits of two wreckers, condemned to haunt for ever the scene of their ill deeds. Here they come now, sailing slowly along on their broad wings, the sunshine glancing on their glossy plumage. They go sweeping by, uttering at times a crooning sound, not a croak at all, a soft, low note, with no touch of harshness in it. Gracefully they wheel and soar and glide, now turning over in the air, now poising like a pair of kestrels. Below them, crouching on the hot sand of the beach that skirts the bases of the cliff, a flock of gulls are resting, like heaps of foam left stranded by the tide. They do not shrink as the dark figures pass over. There are no eggs to plunder from the rocks; no young broods to harry; and a full-grown herring gull will show fight even to a raven.

It is a noble wall of cliff that guards this sandy fringe of the Atlantic; now light, now dark; here bare and weathered and windswept, there overgrown with sea-pink and samphire; and here again worn into deep clefts and cavernous hollows, which, when this old gun was new, were thorns in the side of the Preventive men. No shore in England has seen more smuggling than this. Many a contraband cargo has been landed at the little village at the head of the creek. It is whispered that more than one family of standing here owes its rise to well-planned "runs" of silk and spirits and tobacco. In the side of the Witan Stone—a grey old Menhir that was old in Roman times—there is still pointed out a hole called the "Gauger's Pocket," into which a bag of gold was dropped when a "run" was coming off, with due notice to the exciseman to go and look for it, and then to keep well in the background. It was quite an open ceremony. "Please, sir," a smuggler would say to the officer, "please, sir, your pocket's unbuttoned." "Aye, aye," was the answer, "but I shan't lose my money for all that."

Those days are not so long ago. It is not really many years since the clergyman who tells that story entered on that cure in the West Country which, to use his own words "was a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers, and dissenters," who still held that to shoot the gauger was not only a venial but a meritorious deed. When a man was hanged for murdering one of those hated representatives of law and order, his death was regarded as a piece of flagrant injustice, a crime in the eyes of Heaven itself; the very grass, it was triumphantly pointed out, refusing to grow upon his grave.

Those were days when the prosperity of a sea-board farm depended less on its scanty grazing and its sterile corn-land than on its ill-gotten harvest of the sea. They were all in it. Even a parson has been known to hold the lantern while the spirit kegs were hauled safely through the surf. And once, when a wreck came ashore in church time, and the congregation had with one accord rushed out of doors, the vicar stopped them on their way to the sea. "Brethren," he shouted, "I have but five words more to say." Then walking deliberately to the front, and taking off his surplice, he said: "Now, let us start fair."

This is a terrible coast. There are villages where half the gardens are decorated with figure-heads of lost ships, where the churchyards are strewn with sorrowful memorials of men, known or nameless, whose lifeless bodies have been given up by the sea. It is not long since corpses that were washed ashore were buried with scant ceremony just above high-water mark. But of recent years these wasted relics of mortality have been treated with more reverence, and in some villages it has become a custom to use figure-heads of wrecked vessels as memorials of the dead. In one place the white effigy of an armed warrior guards the grave of thirteen sailors, whose bodies the sea had laid upon the shore. In another graveyard the stern of a ship's boat has been set up over the remains of ten seamen "who were drifted on shore in a boat, frozen to death, at Beacon Cove, in this parish," one Sunday in December, now nearly fifty years ago. The rock-bound coast is as perilous as ever, but the days have gone when the shipwrecked mariner was dashed ashore alive only to meet his death from enemies more relentless than the waves. It was the height of rashness in the good old wrecking times to rescue a drowning man:—

"Save a stranger from the sea,

And he'll turn your enemy."

In our time, at any rate, no shipwrecked sailor would meet with anything but kindness at the hands of Englishmen. The real race of wreckers has died out—that is to say, the cold-blooded wretches who would lure a ship ashore, and then murder the crew by way of precaution before proceeding to plunder the cargo. But the spirit of plunder at least is not dead. Coastguardsmen and agents of insurance companies know only too well how cleverly the Cornish fishermen even of to-day, though ready to lend willing hands in salving, and though fairly well paid for it too, contrive to appropriate stray things that take their fancy. It is not long since a large ship went ashore at the Lizard, and finally ground herself to pieces on the rocks. The closest watch was kept by the agents and preventive men, but next spring a perfect epidemic of musical instruments broke out in every village in the district, proving audibly enough that the light-fingered wreckers had been at their tricks all the time. How it is done the rambler in the West Country, who can use his eyes and ears, will soon discover; will agree too, with the remark made the other day in a Western village, that people who talked of wrecking as a thing of the past knew very little about it.

"You see, sir," said a weather-beaten fisherman, "a great deal drifts out of a wreck, and although there are salvage men always on the watch, there's many a cask and bale that's picked up by our boats. One man with a long pair of tongs and another with a water-telescope can make a good thing of it between them. There was an Italian steamer, now, that went ashore at Mullion. She was full of fruit and wine and all sorts of things—enough for everybody. There was great cases of champagne lying about, and the word went round among our men that it was 'real' pain, with no 'sham' to it, for when we did knock the tops of the bottles off, the wine all went out at one spurt, and we couldn't get a drop. But at last we got corkscrews, and then we was happy. Well, I had a cask of sherry wine out of her," he went on, "and I got it safe in by the back way, and you see I've a coastguardsman living on each side of me. But, law bless you, sir! they be just the same as we…. Oh, yes, sir, everything is supposed to be given up, but everything isn't, not by a good way. And when we risk our lives to save the cargo, who has a better right to a share of it than we?"

He was near the Mosel, he said, when she ran full speed upon the rocks, and the sound of it was like a thousand tons of cliff falling into the sea, and such shrieks as never were heard…. Might he have stopped her? Well, perhaps he might. But a mate of his who put out at the risk of his life, and warned a big liner that was too close in shore—she was backed off and saved—never got so much as a word of thanks, let alone any reward, for saving her. "Another man," he went on, "warned a steamer from his boat, and, as I'm a living man, they tried to swamp him for fear the captain should be blamed for his bad sailing. No, sir, we'll never do nothing to risk life, but if we can't get fair pay for saving a ship, we'll get fair share by helping ourselves." … Might anything be kept that was picked up? Oh yes, pieces of timber below a certain length. He was pressed further as to how the particular length was settled. "Well," he said slowly, "we do keep a saw in our boat."

DARTMOOR DAYS.

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The dwellers in the picturesque homesteads scattered at wide intervals over this countryside would hardly be content to hear these hills of theirs called a wilderness. But up yonder against the sky line, with grey clouds trailing low along its topmost ridges, is a brow of the wildest wilderness in England, and these hillside pastures are the fringe of Dartmoor. One might well imagine, too, looking out over this beautiful landscape, that the lines of these West Country yeomen were fallen to them in pleasant places. And, indeed, fortunes have been made here in the "good old days," when bread was dear and wages were at starvation point. But times are hard. And there are sons of the soil here now working for hire on other farms, whose sires held broad acres of their own.

The wayfarer who, making his way up from Chagford towards the moorland, should chance to pass this little settlement, might well pause in wonder as he passed the gate, and stand and rub his eyes in doubt whether it was a dream or not. So unlike the old country is this log hut and all about it that a settler from the Bush might, if he saw it, almost fancy himself upon his native heath. The very trees that flourish here are strange. Among shrubs that have been brought from the slopes of the Himalaya, grow tall bamboos whose feathery crowns look over the topmost ridges of the roof. And yet on every hand there are suggestions of the moorland—those stacks of peat, with their picturesque coverings of furze and straw; that granite roller, so thickly set with crystals of felspar. The very props of the clothes-line are untrimmed birch poles from the wood, wearing still their silvery bark. It is moorland earth that made those rhododendron thickets so broad and strong. It is moorland air that has draped the trees with shaggy lichens, adding centuries of age to oaks yet hardly in their prime, and lending to the sturdy fruit bushes of the borders the air of hoary patriarchs. Furze bushes, in whose thorny depths the yellow-hammers build in springtime, and willow-warblers weave their domes of grass, flourish in the garden precincts. And all the banks are overgrown with a green jungle of fern and broom and bilberry—children of the moorland, stealing down to regain their lost dominions.

This is winter by the calendar. But it is a day of clear shining after rain. The air is full of the sound of streams—of the roar of moorland torrents, of the deeper voice of the river plunging through the wooded gorge below. The stems of the tall birches in the wood below the house, still wet with last night's rain, shine as if they were sheathed in silver, and their branches glitter as if every twig were hung with silver beads—as, indeed, they are, the silver of the clinging raindrops.

A graceful, yellow-breasted wagtail, still lingering here when the rest of her kindred are across the sea, flutters down now and then from the top of the dovecot to catch the flies that are sunning themselves against the wall. On the roof above the pigeons sit in conclave, their slumbrous voices just in keeping with the music of the streams. In his cage against the wall of the hut I can hear, now and then, a raven stirring. He is a silent bird for the most part:

"He speaketh not; and yet there lies

A conversation in his eyes—

The golden silence of the Greek,

The gravest wisdom of the wise,

As if he could, but would not speak."

Some day he will talk, and then perhaps we shall learn what strange things he has been hoarding in the dark places of his memory. Again and again last night he woke me by rattling the bars of his prison, or by sharpening that great bill of his against his perch. I doubt if he slept a wink before daylight. It was strange to hear him thus in the darkness. At times, too, I heard the mellow voices of the owls, sounding clear above the rush of the streams and the patter of rain upon the roof.

Birds pass and repass now in the sunlight. At times the pigeons sweep down from their rest overhead, with sudden clatter of wings, and as they wheel round the house they rouse into speech for a moment the taciturn jackdaw, whose cage adjoins the prison of the yet more silent raven.

From far up the moorland sounds the hoarse clamour of crows. And magpies go by, carefully keeping clear of the precincts, as if they were aware that the Master of the House had a keen eye and a steady hand. But they might lay aside their fears. No beast or bird is vermin in this corner of Arcadia. No jay or magpie ever suffered here the penalty of evil deeds or tarnished reputation. One night the Master of the House was roused by the sounds of a slight scuffle outside. An owl had swooped on a rat in a corner of the verandah, and through the wooden wall of the hut was plainly heard the rustle of feathers as the bird spread its broad wings over the body of its victim. Weasels find sanctuary under the very flooring of the shanty, and stoats may hunt the covers at their will without fear of trap or gun. The Hunt know well that there is no surer spot to find a fox than the larch plantations up yonder on the hill. And there, too, the badgers pursue in safety the even tenour of their harmless lives.

When the larches were first planted, and were but just struggling to get their heads above the hillside jungle, grasshopper-warblers hid their nests on the ground among them, and chats, and tree-pipits. A few years later blackbirds came and built among the branches. Now the ring-doves trust their frail platforms of stick to the strong young arms. And in a year or two sparrow-hawks and magpies will build in the green tops. The trees have already killed the grass about their feet, and the bare earth beneath their shadow is a favourite haunt of the woodcock.

But in spite of crows and magpies, stoats and weasels, and all the creatures of the wild that are too often branded as vermin, there is no want of pheasants in the cover. And the Master of the House, with his man behind him, and three eager little terriers dancing at his heels, has but this moment left me to look for a woodcock. The dogs are much keener for the sport than their owner, master of woodcraft though he be. He is always readier to use his field-glass than his gun. Many a time, as he stood motionless, gun in hand, has a rabbit cantering by paused to look up at him, or a woodcock settled near, and come and gone unharmed. The moor-folk here are sportsmen born, with the keenest eyes for the whereabouts of hare or pheasant, and far too much given to the setting of gins. The Master of the House—who says that half the pheasants he shoots have already lost a leg—showed me yesterday an illustrated price-list of the traps made by a man who boasts of supplying the Queen and the Prince of Wales, and who reckons in his long list of noble patrons not a few distinguished names that we have been accustomed to think of as belonging to champions of the "brute" creation. Yet here were not only rat-traps and rabbit-traps, traps for foxes and even for tigers, but traps—of horrible device, and certain to inflict the most cruel tortures—for killing hawks and herons. Surely, if some keepers are still ignorant and brutal, better things might have been expected of their masters. And his must be a mean and sordid soul who would grudge the kingfisher his meed of beauty—even supposing that so rare a bird can do any appreciable amount of harm. Yet in this list of fiendish enginry is figured a kingfisher-trap. This the purchaser is directed "to screw to a stump in the water where the birds resort, and place a piece of wood on the fork for them to alight on, or a small fish may be used as bait."

In the last few days, when from other parts of the island have come reports of bitter weather, of rough winds and frosty airs, the climate here has been almost summer-like. Yesterday, as I sat in the verandah, more than one wasp, roused by the sunshine from her winter slumber, was buzzing among the rafters overhead. But, as the day wore on, there were signs of a change. Ominous-looking clouds began to gather up from the southward. And, in the late afternoon, as we rode slowly up the steep track towards the moor, there came now and then a spurt of wind and rain.

The road, like so many of the Dartmoor roads, was fenced by rude walls of granite, built of blocks so ponderous as to suggest that only giants could have reared such cyclopean masonry. Every chink between the stones was fringed with fern and bilberry. Clinging lichens made the grey faces of the granite greyer still; while others, nestling in mossy hollows, were tipped with scarlet, recalling the vivid touches of colour over the eyes of a moorfowl.

High up on the moorland, looking down on one of the most beautiful of its many river valleys, we came on a great stone circle, known to the moor men as the Roundy Pound—a double ring of unhewn, irregular blocks of granite, shaggy with ages' growth of lichens, and with a single thorn tree standing in the midst, mantled from base to crest with grey—a hoary patriarch, like the lone priest of long-forgotten rites. Far below lay the valley of the Teign, winding away into the hills. To the right rose the sad-coloured slopes of the moorland, here darkened with dead bracken, and there brightened by pale sheets of withered grass. On the left was a birch wood, with a rare purple bloom upon its leafless boughs, like the purple of far hills at sunset. Here and there a dead birch stem glimmered white against the dark. And about the feet of the bare trees was a wealth of colour almost more marvellous still—the rich brown, lustrous velvet of mosses and dead leaves, the fiery red of withered brake fern, beaten down by wind and rain. Below the wood, on a little island in the river, was a group of old Scotch firs, with the water gleaming white between the ruddy branches. Over all there stretched away the far-reaching wastes of the moorland, lifeless, desolate, with a fringe of mist along the sky line.

Night closed in grey and wet. As the hours passed, I woke at times to hear the rush of the rain, the growing sounds of multitudinous streams, the deepening voice of the river roaring through its wooded passes. Morning broke on a day of undoubted Dartmoor weather—no gleam of sunshine anywhere; cold, clinging mists on every hand; grey sheets of rain stalking like ghosts across the landscape.

The day was at its very worst when the keeper, who had been at work since daylight rescuing trout that, in struggling up the swollen streams, had got themselves into difficulties in unexpected shallows, came up to the house and stood for a minute in the rain, the water streaming from every outlying point in his figure, and looked inquiringly at the Master of the House. The Master groaned. But he threw on his old shooting-coat, picked up a handful of cartridges, and took his gun from the corner, and the two men sallied out into the rain.

It was, in truth, a dreary morning. There was no sunshine now to light the dripping birch stems. But even under that grey sky there was marvellous beauty in the bare boughs, in the brown oak leaves, in the streaming ferns on the green bank below. Under the bank was a new gleam of silver, where the swollen brook went swirling by under a grey brow of granite. Hour after hour fell the pitiless rain. Every thread of water on the hillside was a headlong torrent. The road below the house was deep under a rushing flood.

It was late when the little shooting party came back, their coming heralded by the screaming of a troop of jays that apparently kept pace with them as they plodded through the underwood. But the birds were not inveighing against the sportsmen. When my friend returned, he told me that as he passed under a pollard oak an owl flew out, almost brushing him with its wings. The jays, who were hanging about among the thickets on the edge of the wood, espied it in a moment. And, raising a hue and cry that was caught up by every finch and tit and blackbird within hearing, they chased the bewildered bird from tree to tree, scolding and storming, and buffeting it with their wings. Earlier in the afternoon a rabbit passed, unnoticed by the dogs, not running, but leaping, across the wood; and close at its heels a weasel, following in hot pursuit.

The rain was slackening a little as we turned into the hut. But a heavy fog was closing in from the moor, blotting out even the near woodland with its wall of grey. Pleasant, indeed, after the mist and the rain was the glow of lamplight. And pleasanter still the glow of roaring oak logs, as we sat that night, each with a terrier on his knee, before the great wood fire. The dogs have taken kindly to the casual stranger, and one of them in particular is fond of sitting by me on a chair at meal times, resting her head on my arm in the most engaging manner. The two are on the best of terms for the most part, but a little attention paid to one is apt to lead to trouble with the other. I am told that there is sometimes a good deal of jealousy shown in the retrieving of a rabbit—a circumstance which, as may readily be guessed, does not tend to improve the condition of the game. And the slippers which we threw to distant corners of the hut for the dogs to bring back to us suffered severely in the bringing.

As we sat by the fire I heard something of the dangers of the moor, and of the reality of getting lost at night or in a Dartmoor fog. The oldest hand, said the Master of the House, would be helpless in such a fog as now lay round the house. A good plan, he added, is to follow a stream if you are fortunate enough to find one. Sooner or later you are sure to come to a house. He himself was on the moor once, with two companions, far away from any path, when a dense mist came on. After long walking, he happened, by great good fortune, on the wall that bounded his own common, and came at length to a familiar gate that he knew was only half a mile from home.

The three wanderers drew a breath of relief. They were all right now. The haunting fear of having to pass a night upon the moor, as many a lost wayfarer has done, was forgotten in a moment. With confident steps they marched through the mist straight down the slope towards this bungalow. But after going steadily for three hours, with a gradually growing conviction that something after all must be wrong, they found themselves back at the same wall, and at the very identical gate. They had been walking in a circle—an experience only too familiar to travellers who have lost their way in the desert. They now followed the wall until it turned abruptly down the hill. My friend then walked close to it, while the others kept abreast of him, at a distance of a hundred yards or so, that they might avoid a bog which skirted the enclosure. In this way, shouting to each other now and then, they reached here in safety, not having seen each other since they parted company.

DARTMOOR—EVENING: TAKING HOME THE SHEEP. [ ImagesList]

Another man, well known in the district—a man who rather prides himself on his acquaintance with Dartmoor—will not soon be allowed to forget how he set off on horseback one day in the mist, taking a short cut across the moor, by which he expected in half an hour to strike the Princetown road, and how, after an hour and a half of pretty hard riding, he too, found himself at the spot from which he had started.

WYCHANGER: A FAR RETREAT.

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On the northern edge of Exmoor, parted from the outer world by a long ridge of wooded hills that die away into a bold headland by the grey sea, there lies a spacious valley—fair even for the West Country, a valley that for its beauty of broad fields and noble trees and old-world villages, may rank among the fairest in all England. The traveller by the well-kept coach road that passes along the foot of the hills, almost from end to end of it, looking across its green meadows and its red corn-lands to the deer-haunted heights of Dunkerry, sees something of its beauty, of its picturesque cottages, its wooded slopes, its rich pasture lands; may even catch a glimpse in passing of that old mill that, with its pointed gables, its rambling outbuildings, its rude bridges, and its

"Dark wheel that toils amid the hurry

And rushing of the flume,"

is like an artist's dream.

He who fares through on foot will know more of its charm, but even he is hardly likely to discover the best of its lovely lanes, deep set under over-arching hedgerows, the oldest and most magnificent of its trees, the most picturesque and retiring of its cottages. While hidden behind a rampart of low hills on the very skirts of Dunkery, the most beautiful village of all, an ideal West Country hamlet, will escape him altogether:—a village in a nest of hills, with brown gables all embowered in green. By the church, whose grey tower rises in the midst, two poplars stand, their young leaves trembling in the sunshine, their tall forms just swaying in the wind.

The old manor house, whose traditions go back beyond the days of the Armada, seems to stand at the very limit of the world. So near the wilderness is it that the creatures of the wild, the birds, the beasts, share with man the possession of its barns and outbuildings. Its lawns, its thick-growing bays and laurels, its broad eaves, the masonry of its old walls are haunted by innumerable birds.

In the early morning, an hour or more before the sunrise, the whole air about the house is filled with sweet sounds, with the sunny ripple of the goldfinch's song, with the mingled chorus of thrush and blackbird, of wrens and robins and warblers, with the call of the cuckoo, the pipe of the wryneck, the croon of doves among the larches on the hill. At times, from far up the moorland comes down even the strange cry of a buzzard, or the croak of a wandering raven. All day the garden is full of pleasant sounds and sweet suggestions of the woodland, of the hushed whispers of swift moorland streams, of the stir of winds among the restless pines.

Even after sundown life is still stirring. Long after the mists of evening have begun to gather on the darkening hills the cuckoo calls. The musical halloo of wandering owls breaks in through the vespers of the blackbird, and the shrill challenge of the black-cock sounds loud on the fringe of the moorland. Instead of the swallows, that all day float singing round the eaves, the bats come out of hiding in old barns and ruinous outbuildings, and flutter on silent wings through vacant windows.

In the twilight even the wild red deer stray down from their fastness to the very precincts of the garden. It is not long since, in the hind-hunting time, the "tufters" broke away after a stag and followed it, in spite of all the efforts of the huntsmen, far across the moor and down into the lowland. And, when at length the hounds were beaten off, two sheep-dogs from the village took up the chase and drove the stag up here to the Manor House. There it stood for hours in a narrow passage near the stables, showing a bold front to its pursuers, and undismayed by the curious villagers who came thronging up to gaze at it—a noble beast, with all its honours. Someone at length opened the door of an empty stable, and the stag walked quietly in. Tired out with the long chase over the slopes of Dunkery, it stayed in its strange asylum two days and nights, entirely unmoved by efforts to dislodge it, but lowering its antlers in a moment if one of its visitors made an attempt to cross the threshold; though when one of the men, thinking it had gone, went into the stable after dark and actually brushed against it, the stag, happily for him, took no notice. The door was left open; the noble beast was free to go when it would. On the third morning the stable was empty; the strange guest had gone. A line of footprints across the lawn to the fence that parts the garden from the paddock, and up the long meadow towards the hanger, showed how it had made its way back unmolested to its haunt upon the moor.

Guests almost as strange are two wild ducks that built a nest in a pool in the field below the house. The eggs were hatched not many days since, and the young brood were caught and given in charge to a hen, who, so far, has proved herself but an indifferent foster-mother. The drake, after the manner of his kind, has another mate, and she is still sitting on her eggs on a small island in another pond near by. And he and the mother of the lost family still linger about the farm. You may see them flying past the windows on their way down from one of the moorland streams, or watch them in the meadow by the empty nest. Or you may even chance upon them among the outbuildings, the drake a little way in advance, walking slowly forward, looking this way and that, pausing now and then at some strange sound; while his sober-tinted mate follows meekly a yard or so behind him. Now they stand doubtful, uncertain whether or no it is safe to enter the precincts. At length they venture in. Now walk quietly after them. There they stand, a gallant pair, he splendid with the rich green velvet of his glossy head, the white ring about his neck, the dark chocolate of his breast, his brilliant orange legs, and all the exquisite shades of grey upon his beautiful back: she with quiet plumage, streaked and mottled with soft tones of brown, looking for all the world like a dry heap of reeds and withered sedges. In a moment they are aware of danger. They move closer together. The drake utters a low warning call, nodding his head, slowly at first, then faster and faster until, with a loud note the two birds spread their beautiful wings, wheel round the house, and sail down to their old haunt by the pool.

By the same pool, not fifty yards from the road, there is another nest—a moorhen's; and if you creep quietly up you may see the old bird on her nest of rushes under the bank, her dark figure looking little more than a patch of shadow in the heart of the bramble bush that overhangs her home. Her, too, you may watch in the early mornings wading among the long grass of the meadow, or you may even catch a glimpse of her as she paddles fast across the pool, keeping time with her glossy head to the rapid movement of her feet.

Hood has told us how, in his "Haunted House,"

"A wren had built within the porch, she found

The quiet loneliness so sure and thorough."

It is almost more strange that here a pair of chaffinches have made a sanctuary of this porch, and have built their nest just over the door, within arm's reach of every passer-by. It is an exquisite work of art, whose moss and lichen, felted with cobwebs and fine strands of wool fitted deftly on the curve of a level larch pole, and woven among the young shoots of the climbing rose tree, whose leaves hang down as if to hide it, might have escaped notice altogether were it not that the little builders are busy all day upon the grass before the windows, now taking short flights among the laurels or the branches of the old arbutus, or the great bay tree that overhangs the lawn, scenting all the air with its abundant bloom, and that now and then they fly up to their nest over the doorway.

A far retreat—a spot in which the lover of nature would only too gladly settle down, content, amid this gracious scenery and these pleasant sights and sounds, to end his days in one of the little old-world cottages of "the sweetest village in the world," with their tiny windows, their quaint gables, their roofs of russet thatch. A far retreat, upon whose dreamlike quiet no ripple of unrest could surely enter.

We can hardly realise that it was a lord of this very manor who, though long past his three score years and ten, held a fortress for King Charles until the last extremity, marching out at length with all the honours of war.

It is stranger still that a marble tablet on the chancel wall of the old church records how a rector of this peaceful parish left his charge and followed his master to the war; how he raised a troop of horse for the King's service; how four of his sons were captains in the Royal army; and how he himself, after Worcester's Crowning Fight, went with the second Charles across the sea, giving up all, with a devotion worthy of a better cause, for a prince whom the clearer vision of our time justly brands as "immoral, dishonourable, and contemptible."

LUCCOMBE: TWILIGHT IN THE HOLLOW.

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Round the old mill that stands like a drowsy sentinel at the gate of the valley, quiet reigns. Silenced is the plash of the wheel; hushed the low rumble of the rude machinery. Through the rich grass of the meadow by the stream the red cattle are trooping home in answer to the milking call. The sun, already sunk below the fringe of woodland on the hill, shows like a fiery cloud through the dark lattice work of branches. Light still lingers on the steep slope across the glen, on tawny grass and golden furze, and on points of grey rock that here and there break through the short turf. There is sunshine still upon the dark tops of the highest ridge of pines, and there are lines of silver on the branches of a giant oak whose crest towers far above his fellows. But here in the hollow the mist of evening gathers. All along the stream are drawn grey lines of vapour that, in the far recesses of the valley, deepen to a shadowy gloom.

The birds, with whose notes the whole glen was ringing, grow silent one by one. Their brief vesper hour is almost over. The hush of night is settling on the woodland. Far up the slope there still sounds the clear whistle of a blackbird. A thrush, too, is singing, as if moved to rivalry. His is a song less wild and thrilling, less powerful and passionate, yet a masterpiece of melody. Still through the deepening shadows rings the clear treble of the robin, and through all, like a whisper of peace, one hears the slumbrous voices of the doves.

Two cuckoos are still calling; one near at hand, whose loud notes, clear and mellow, seem to linger among the trees, dying slowly, like music in the roof of a cathedral. Another, more distant, answers him. They keep such perfect time that the stronger voice overpowers half the answer, and, for the most part three notes alone are audible, the last one faint and low, and like a soft refrain:

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

Cuckoo!

The cuckoo's life is like that of no other bird that flies. There are no household cares for him; no nest to build, no eggs to warm, no brood to forage for. His sole business seems but to call his own name all day among the tree tops. It is a beautiful sound. And yet there are times when the cuckoo, as much as any bandit of the air, any crow, or sparrow-hawk, or prowling magpie, breaks the peace of the sylvan solitude. He may call all day if he will, without let or hindrance, or the least attempt at interruption. The birds pay little heed to him, save now and then in an idle moment to mob him and jeer at and hustle him, as they love to do to an owl, who by some mischance has sallied out into the daylight.

But the moment his mate is suspected of designs on the nest of some defenceless hedge-sparrow, or robin, or wagtail, with an eye to finding foster parents for her own discarded offspring, the whole neighbourhood is up in arms. A few days since a cuckoo, who had evidently set her heart on a robin's nest in the thick growth of ivy round the chimney of one of the houses in the village, alighted in the top of a tall aspen that overlooked the spot. She settled on the roof of the house to reconnoitre. She even perched on the ledge of the garret window to get a better view. And all the while she was followed by an excited mob of redstarts, wagtails, and robins, scolding, storming, chattering. Sometimes, as if dismayed by their persistent clamour, the cuckoo made a half circuit of the garden, diving in and out among the bushes, swooping down to avoid the attack of some pursuer more importunate than the rest, and uttering now and then a strange, inarticulate cry, as if—which is likely enough—she were carrying in her mouth the egg she wanted to leave in the robin's nest. She gave it up at last, plunging down into a great bay tree, seeking in its thick-growing foliage some respite from pursuit.

The darkness deepens. But there is still light enough to follow the deer-path among the trees, whose thick carpeting of brown dry pine-needles is soft as velvet to the feet. It is not yet too dark to see the black-cock that gets up from the bilberry jungle by the path, or the wood pigeons that, when you pause beneath their roosting place, go crashing out from the branches overhead. You can still watch the two squirrels that chase each other round the stem of a giant ash tree; can follow them, when, startled from their frolic, they take a short cut homeward through the larch-tops. They leap from the firm footing of one tree to the drooping bough beyond, and when it goes down, down beneath them like a blade of grass, they go on, without a moment's pause, towards their nest in the heart of the wood. So few wayfarers disturb the quiet here—or else the brown woodlanders have had such scant experience of the ways of man, of his love of capture and annexation—that the squirrels have not thought it worth while to build their stronghold high among the trees. It is not twenty feet from the ground. It is like a great wren's nest, a ball of moss, thick and closely felted, and marvellously laced round and round with long pliant larch twigs, and with only the least trace of an entrance at the side.

A flock of swifts are careering down the glen, like a troop of noisy revellers; their wild chorus sounding shrill and clear in the deepening hush of night. They wheel, with loud rustle of keen wings, and dash upwards towards the moor. Again that swift career along the grass-grown road; again that wild exultant scream, so fierce, so beautiful. Deride it if you will. Call it hoarse, discordant, savage. It is a victorious pæan, a song of triumph, an exultant chorus proclaiming the empire of the air.

The dark forms vanish; the wild notes die away. It is the last sound of daylight.

"Far away, some belfry chime

Breathes a prayer across the moors."

The last sound of daylight. The children of the night are abroad. White moths, painted boldly on the shadows, flit by like phantoms. Ghost-like, too, is the soundless flutter of a bat that, by the dark archway of the old bridge, chases the insects that hover on the stream. The long, low, monotonous call of the grasshopper-warbler among the furze bushes on the edge of the wood, is a strange sound;—the voice of a cricket, one might think, and not of a bird at all. Strange, too, is the droning note of a nightjar, rising and falling as if the bird, wheeling this way and that, were chasing moths among the trees. The bats have voices, though their flight is soundless, and their faint shrill cries grow in the stillness louder and more clear. At intervals an owl hoots, startling from their half sleep the drowsy birds among the thickets over which he passes, so that one may follow his flight by the clamour he leaves behind him. Among the trees there sounds at times the crash of a belated ring-dove, settling down for the night, followed by a murmur of soft love notes, an answering whisper, and then silence.

Yet the air is full of faint, indistinguishable sounds, the opening of leaves perhaps, the patter of spent petals, the fall of pine needles, and the movements of night-wandering creatures. And to every sound the darkness lends a touch of mystery. Fancy could paint almost anything of strange and startling among the black shadows of the wood. You stop, almost in terror, when a pheasant rises, under your very feet, with a great rush of wings, and vanishes into the gloom. A blackbird, flying over unseen, sounds his loud alarm in passing, ringing, musical, metallic, like the throbbing string of some wild instrument.

There is another sound, the sound as of some large animal moving heavily among the thickets near the stream, with now and then a crash of branches. The noise draws nearer. Some red deer are making their way down to the water. The light wind is blowing straight this way. There is nothing to warn them. The leader pauses, not five yards away, fetlock deep in the soft green morass along one of the small streams that vein the hill. His shape is dark and indistinct, yet there is just light enough to see that he has antlers still. Behind him is a troop of hinds, a mingled mass of stately, slow-moving, shadowy figures, leisurely crashing through the thickets. One strolls idly this way, closer still, pausing to browse on the leaves of the very willow that spreads its long boughs overhead. Another follows, and another. There are ten of them, at least, and not one aware of danger. Like Ajax, one longs for daylight. Yet daylight must have revealed the ambush. They are passing on. Another moment and they will have taken the alarm. Stand up and shout. What headlong rush, what wild stampede, what thunder of swift hoofs, what gallop of flying feet. Away they go, crashing through the underwood, up the slope, into the black, impenetrable shadows—sanctuary as safe as the very densest covert of the forest.

HORNER WATER.

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The man who knows Exmoor only in the pride of its summer beauty, who has, it may be, followed the staghounds over its far-reaching slopes through a splendour of heath and ling and blossomed furze, who has never seen the broad shoulders of Dunkery save when they were wrapped about with royal purple, would find the moorland now in very different mood, would think it even now, far on towards the summer, desolate and sad-coloured and forlorn. The gorse, indeed, is in its prime. Its fragrant gold is as full of beauty as when the mingled mob of horse and foot and carriages gathers, for the first Meet of the season, on the smooth crown of Cloutsham Ball.

The gorse is a flower of the year. It is in bloom even in January. There is an old saw that declares it to be, like kissing, never out of season. But the heather that covers so much of the slopes of Dunkery wears at this moment its very somberest of hues. Standing on the fringe of the moorland, on the brink of one of the deep glens that run into the heart of the hills, and looking up the slope towards the dark summit, one might think that winter was not over even yet. There is a touch of vivid green here and there, round the birthplace of some mountain stream. There is colour on the young birches that one by one are feeling their way up out of the hollow. But in the sober brown of the heather, in the pearl grey of the peat moss, in the dark hue of the gaunt and twisted pines scattered at far intervals in front of the advancing forest, there is no sign of the sweet influences of the spring.

A lonely spot. There is not a house in sight, no farm, no hedgerow, no sign of man's dominion anywhere, beyond faint traces of bridle paths, like dark lines along the heath, or a broader track whose warm red shows a moment as it climbs some rising of the moor. A solitary skylark sings over the brown heather. At times a buzzard wails, as on broad wings he drifts in mighty circles overhead, a dark spot against the pale blue heaven. Sounds like these but deepen the sense of loneliness. But there is charm in the very solitude. There is charm in the dark heath and in the golden furze—in the play of the cloud-shadows that each moment change the tones of brown and green and grey. There is charm in the sweet breath of the gorse, and above all, in the bright, fresh air of the open moorland. And however bare and voiceless these sombre slopes, each hollow that wanders away into the hills is filled to overflowing with a sea of mingled foliage, all astir with life and movement.

The path that leads down from the highland to the hollow looks upon a different world. The steep sides of the glen are green to the very brim, are covered, right up to the brown fringe of heather, with noble oaks in the pride of fresh, young foliage, among whose golden green, all shimmering in a haze of sunlight, shows the shadowy grey of boughs still bare, and in the open spaces are all carpeted with the rich red of dead bracken, or the vivid green of bilberry leaves. From far below, out of the mist of green and grey, rises the song of a swift mountain stream, whose pools and white cascades and brawling rapids gleam among the trees like scattered links of silver.

There is a sudden clatter of stones upon the farther slope. Two stags and four attendant hinds are making their way up from Horner Water. They pause and look this way; the head of the leader lifted, his antlers clear against the foliage behind him. This is Exmoor. Here the red deer are on their native heath. This is their last stronghold south of the Border. And it is in glens like this that they find the sanctuary they love. The noble beasts stand long at gaze. At last the leader turns, and moves slowly up the slope, the others falling into line behind him. They quicken the pace as they gain more easy ground, and breaking into a canter, wind in gallant style across the heath. They pause for a last look as they reach the summit of the ridge, their figures darkly cut against the sky.

The road sinks lower, lower yet, down into the green heart of the glen. Noble trees they are that fill the hollow. Some have long since passed their prime. Their mighty branches are thick with moss and lichen, and fringed with green tongues of fern. In rifts that time and storm have carved in their huge columns, rowan and bramble and young holly trees are rooted. Grey arms of ivy, almost as broad and vigorous as they, are twined with fatal clasp about their sturdy stems. Where the pathway crosses at the ford, there stands a blasted tree: a giant oak, whose top, wrecked and shattered though it is, rises high above its forest brothers. Its bark has all fallen away. Its bare limbs glimmer ghost-like through the green gloom.

The whole glen is full of life. Solitude there may be, but not silence. The air is musical with the ripple of the stream, and with the songs of sweet-voiced warblers. Over the tree tops clamorous daws are passing, and the light wings of homeward-flying doves. Among the boulders that winter floods have heaped along the torrent—that even now, before the patient, eternal, resistless chafing of the water, are moving slowly down the stream—you may startle a heron from his noonday dreaming. Or you may come unaware upon a pair of wild ducks, paddling softly on one of the smooth and sheltered reaches, the mallard still splendid in the nuptial plumage he is so soon to lose. Only a few weeks longer will he wear it. Summer will find him in a quiet-coloured garb, a suit of brown and grey as plain and unpretending as the dress of his sober-tinted mate.

This, too, is the dipper's haunt. Again and again you will meet him on his way up stream, flying swift and straight, with sharp note of warning on spying a stranger near his fishing grounds. Or you may watch him as he stands on some small island in the torrent, his white breast gleaming like a patch of silver in the water under him, bowing and calling, and now breaking off into that sweet, wild song so dear to the soul of the fisherman. The dipper's nest of moss and leaves and withered sedges, hidden deftly in some old stump by the shore, is empty and deserted. His mate and he are out all day on the river with their little mob of dusky children.

It is a pleasant path that winds leisurely along the glen, now wandering with the stream, now passing it by a ford, now loitering among the trees, now fenced on either hand with tall thickets of gorse and briar and hawthorn, now keeping close by the grey willows that overhang the water. It is not a wide stream to cross, for all the rain. The deer, whose fresh footmarks are printed deep in the moist earth all along its banks, can easily leap over it. The squirrels on their airy highway along meeting oak boughs far above it, have no need to think of it at all. But for the rabbits there is no way over but through the stream itself. And here, a few days since, a rabbit, startled from the herbage on the brink, took to the water without a moment's hesitation; a mere baby of a rabbit, so small and slight that it was carried along for yards by the swift current before it could get into shallow water and struggle up the bank.

Suddenly two birds rise soaring from the trees, better seen when they are clear of the valley, and sharply drawn against the sky. One slow-winged and heavy, one quick and active, and deft in every movement. A crow and a sparrow-hawk. They are fighting. Sounds of battle float downwards through the air—the fierce defiance of the hawk, the hoarse answer of his black antagonist. Round and round they go, wheeling, sinking, soaring, now the hawk uppermost, and now the crow. To watch the skilful manœuvres of the hawk, one might think there was little doubt about the issue. How easily he sweeps past his lumbering enemy, how he clutches at him with talons, how he flouts him with his strong wings. Yet the crow, for all his awkwardness, is armed with no mean weapon. The hawk knows well the value of that black dagger of a bill. And so they drift over the rim of the valley to the open moorland, fighting to the last.

ON EXMOOR: WHERE RED DEER HIDE.

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High up on the moorland, in a wilderness of dead heather—surely beyond all power of spring-time to call back to life—with dead gorse bushes scattered over it, gaunt and spectral, unlighted by any touch of golden bloom, there stands an ancient grave-mound. It is the merest flaw in the wide landscape. A roadway passes near it. But from elsewhere, unless it chanced to cut the sky line, you might search for it in vain. Looking across the grassy rim of the hollow space within it, a space like the crater of some spent volcano, you see nothing but the pale summer sky above you, and, stretching away on every side, a waste of desolate, far-reaching undulations, to whose wintry hues the scanty patches of grass and the tender tone of the late bilberry plants have hardly, even yet, lent any tinge of green.

This is the very heart of the wilderness. There is not a house in sight. There are no fields, no fences, no horses, no red cattle, not a sheep even; no single moving figure, save of a bird that flits restlessly among the gorse. This is almost as bleak and bare a landscape as the haunt of the "Dead Drummer" upon Salisbury Plain.

Yet it is a beautiful landscape, still and lonely though it be. There is no gold of blossomed gorse, no rich Tyrian of early heather. But there is marvellous wealth of colour even in these sheets of dead ling, whose varied greys and browns are strengthened here to deep shades of purple, and there,—by a carpet of withered brake fern, beaten down by wind and rain, and with stout young fronds but just beginning to uncurl,—are fairly kindled into red. At one point a belt of dry sedges gleams like a grey river. At another a patch of vivid green betrays the birthplace of some moorland stream. Round the old hawthorns, dotted here and there over the waste, a green mist is gathering. But the starved and stunted trees of this high upland country are slow to answer to the sunshine, and there are hardly leaves enough yet to hide the shaggy tufts of lichen, silver grey and golden yellow, that hang so thickly on the boughs. In the thorny depths of these storm-beaten trees, even carrion crows venture to build fastnesses, fearing nothing, though with thresholds not six feet above ground, short of an avenging volley from the keeper's gun.

As the hours go by you grow conscious, by degrees, of companions of your solitude. You hear notes of larks and pipits as they flit here and there among the heather. You catch the faint far call of a wandering cuckoo. A stone-chat settles near, on a tall, dead furze bush, and sings over and over his brief roundelay. There are few dwellers on the heath more smart than he, with his coal-black head, his neat white collar, and his ruddy breast. This, too, is the native heath of yonder curlews, wheeling idly across the sky, sounding now and then that musical, clear call, that is one of the most characteristic voices of the moorland.

The black-cock, the true children of the wilderness, are lying close among the heather. The grey dawn is the time to see them best, when they come down to drink and bathe at favourite points along the streams. Towards nightfall, too, you will hear on all sides, but especially on the fringe of the wooded valleys where they come to feed, their strange, hoarse crying, which it is hard to credit is the note of bird at all. In the twilight each old black-cock will take his stand on some hillock, or even on the level ground, and spreading wide his splendid tail, drooping his wings, and sinking his head, like a stag preparing to give battle, will utter strange, almost weird, sounds, which, as you watch his odd figure, and fantastic attitudes, you would hardly think were meant as notes of challenge to his rivals, intended to be full of defiance and contempt.

Beyond the white cart-track, that just shows for a moment before it sinks behind a rising in the heath, runs a deep valley—a great hollow filled almost to the brim with oaks and beeches and tall larch trees;—they, at least, are in the full pride of their magnificent young beauty, with long branches thickly hung with tufts of fragrant green. It is a valley of streams, that, drawn in silver threads from every hill-slope near, set all along with alder and willow, with ferns and rushes, and cool water plants, go plunging through at last out of the narrow gateway of the glen, to widen farther down into a broad, smooth flood, that sweeps in silence among the worn stepping-stones of a village way.

The valley is full of life; full as the moorland here is bare of it. In the great bank that skirts the wood badgers have their holt. Hard by it is a famous "earth," to which every hunted fox for miles round flees for sanctuary. The woodmen have been busy here. The ground is strewn with red larch chips, whose sweet, resinous fragrance hangs heavy on the air. And from the welcome rest of some new-felled tree, whose shorn plumes lie heaped about it in well-ordered faggots, you may listen to the pleasant voices of the doves, and the blithe notes of warblers in the boughs above you. You may watch the pheasants stalking solemnly among the underwood, may see the brown squirrels romping on the grass, or playing follow the leader up and down the smooth-stemmed beech trees. A charméd spot. A spot such as the poet sang of, who

". . . heard the cushies croon

Through the gowden afternoon,

And the Quhair burn singing on its way down to the Tweed."

The red deer love this quiet glen. You may see their sharp footprints along every woodman's path, and by the oozy marge of every stream. Their hour is not yet. Like the fox and the badger, they are lovers of the twilight. It is not till evening darkens that they leave their lairs in the cool depths of the larch copse or the shadowy heart of the oak plantation, and cross the high dyke that parts the farm lands from the cover, and sally out to raid the young corn and the turnips in outlying fields. This is the Red Deer Country. Empty as the landscape is at noon, there are times when this wild heath is all alive with moving figures, horse and hound, and all the bravery of the shouting chase. Many a time has the hunt swept past this solitary tumulus, the gallant stag seen for a moment, perhaps, upon the sky line, as

"With anxious eye he wandered o'er

Mountain and meadow, moss and moor."

There is no hamlet for miles around but has its legends, old and new, of a sport that is dear to all the country side. In one of the moorland churches it is recorded how, some six hundred years since, a villager slew one of the King's deer; how the culprit was "not found," and how, in the end, four neighbouring parishes paid fine to the royal foresters. It is but a mile as the crow flies to a hamlet, lying deep in a hollow of the hills, where last year, when the chase went thundering through the quiet street, the stag, in his despair, sought refuge in the inn, and was pulled down by the hounds within the doorway of the hostelry. It is the most picturesque of inns, with its rambling buildings, its thatched roofs, mossed and lichen stained, its tiny dormer windows, and a sign that has puzzled many an idler on the village green;—uncertain whether, as some would have it, the figure in scarlet is meant for a woman seated on a stile; whether it is a nabob mounted on an elephant; or whether, as the words that run above it would suggest, it is a Roundhead trooper drawing rein under the oak of Boscobel.

TORR STEPS: A MOORLAND RIVER.

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Down a deep valley in the West Country winds a swift moorland stream. Mile after mile of sombre, heath-clad solitudes stretch away on either side of it, broken with gorse and bracken, and with here and there a few stunted and storm-beaten trees. Well-ordered farm lands slope down to it. At far intervals it roars under the ancient bridges of solitary hamlets. Here, in the heart of the great hills, it runs between wooded slopes, covered with thick growth of sturdy oak trees—leafless still, but with purple of fast opening blossoms that, with the rich red brown of dead leaves and withered fern about their feet, lends to the whole glen a glow of warmth and colour.

Here the red deer steal out after sundown over the ruinous wall and through the untended hedgerow to the broad meadow that for a space divides the river from the wood. Here in the twilight the otters play, rolling over and over in the water like great grey cats. The beautiful moorland sheep that lift their horned heads to watch the solitary wayfarer, with half-curious, half-supercilious gaze, seem hardly less the true creatures of the wild than the grey rabbit that you startle from his noonday dreaming among the long grass by the hedgerow, or than the brown squirrel, coming down for a frolic on the soft, green turf.

Below the wooded slope runs the river, here foaming over great blocks of stone lying prostrate in its bed, there eddying round a jutting bar of rock, now loitering in quiet backwaters, where dead leaves and tufts of grass and all the smaller flotsam of the stream spin slowly on the tranquil surface. At one point it roars through a narrow channel between two ponderous stones, which lie calm and unmoved in all the headlong rush; at another it pauses, silent, in a deep, dark pool. Now it is broken all across in a tumultuous cataract, and now again it widens to a broad sheet of waving glass. At a bend in the river bank—a little hollow worn by the floods of many winters—three alders overhang. And at their feet, close to the margin of the stream, sheltered by a screen of strong young branches growing upward from the base of the trees, is a pleasant resting-place from which to watch unseen the life and movement of this bird-haunted hollow—the warblers that throng the thickets by the shore, the dippers that on swift wings pass and repass along the watery highway, the graceful wagtails that with dainty steps run up and down upon the strips of sand.

Looking down from the edge of the slope at the far end of the meadow, framed by the broad arms of giant trees, show the buildings of a farm, that with its wide eaves and crested gables, its deep-sunk dormer windows, its rows of hives, and its ruinous sheds, is a picture in itself. Close by it one of the moorland highways, a narrow country lane, slopes steeply down, crossing the river by a ford. And by the road, its grey masonry clearly drawn against the shadowy spires of thick-growing alder trees, is an old stone bridge—so old that no clue remains, no legend even, to its history or its builders. Two thousand years, perhaps, has the river run beneath these ponderous slabs of stone, laid flat across rude, unmortared piers.

Beyond the bridge, through a purple mist of branches, show silver glimpses of the river, then a broad stretch of meadow with dark pine woods above it, among which the young larch foliage floats in feathery clouds of green, and above these again, the brown and desolate moorland. Near the bridge a little party of wanderers have made their camp. The blue smoke of their fire drifts slowly this way, with the pleasant scent of burning pine wood, the pleasanter voices of girls and the shouts of children. It is a perfect day for camping in the open; with warm air, and blue sky, and soft white clouds sailing slowly over,—a day of clear shining after rain.

The air over the stream is full of insect life, of flies of many shapes and various hues, of browns, and drakes, and duns, so dear to the brown river trout; and, in counterfeit presentment at any rate, almost dearer to the soul of the trout-fisher. And as you watch the myriad wingèd things that sail along the water, that settle on the warm stones, or on the alder boughs, or even on your hand, you will think it small ground for wonder that the thickets by the stream should be so full of birds.

One might think that the roar of the river would be enough to drown all other sounds. But, clear above it rise the notes of tits and finches and warblers. The breezy chatter of the swallows, the call of the dipper, the woodwren's hasty little stave of song, the whistle of the blackbird, the mellow call of the cuckoo, are as plain as if the great voice of the river were not heard at all. In the next tree two finches have alighted; their restless movements and sharp challenge of alarm betraying only too plainly what they are so anxious to conceal, that their nest is somewhere near. Two beautiful birds they are; one with the red flush on his breast, the broad bar of white in either wing, the slate-blue feathers of his lifted crest. The other, hardly less charming, with all her colours pitched in soberer key. With anxious and persistent iteration of their one shrill note of protest, they flit from branch to branch; and when you rise, and peer into the tangle of ivy-mantled boughs above you, the birds grow more clamorous still. There is the nest, its mossy cup woven deftly among the slender twigs, studded all over with lichen points of silver—as ever, a miracle of beauty.

There are many birds preparing for the great event of the year. It is not for nothing, you may be sure, that that old blackbird has stayed out at the same corner of the hedge every day for a week past; there is some good reason for his stealing towards it now across the wood, a moving shadow, quiet for once. We can read the signs of the times in the notes of the birds no less than in the heightened colours of their plumage. It is a love-song pure and simple that yonder hedge sparrow, poised on a straying spray of bramble, is singing so softly to himself. The ringing call of an oxeye overhead never was more clear, and blithe, and musical. But the soft notes of a flock of long-tailed tits, not yet disbanded, have a still softer tone to-day. Their light-hearted gossip seems subdued and low, as if they knew the days were near when every woodlander will go about his work with all the stealth he may. There is a gold-crest rummaging among the ivy that clings about an old elm hard by, almost within arm's length, so near that the touch of vivid yellow on his crown gleams like very gold.

Smoke is still rising from the white ashes of the fire, but it is proof enough that the little group has moved away, and that no one is visible from the highway of the river, when a kingfisher flashes across the bridge, straight up the stream, a swift gleam of azure through the sunlit air. As you follow its flight to the bend where the river vanishes behind its fringing alders, you are aware of a moving point of light on one of the great boulders far out from shore. Then the shape of a dipper shows clearly on the top of the stone. A moment later it dives straight down into the water, reappearing some yards nearer this way, pausing on another great block of sandstone, to bow and curtsey, uttering now and then a loud, clear note, its white gorget glowing like a star, whiter even than the very foam of the river. Now it swims lightly across a smooth backwater. Now it works its way sidelong across a rapid rush of the current, stooping now and then to pick some dainty morsel from among the stones, and all the while moving slowly with the stream, until at last it stands on a stone in mid-channel, not thirty yards away—a graceful, charming, dainty little figure, the very naiad of the mountain stream.

But alas, there is another spectator of its movements. Across the meadow sails a dark, hawk-like figure, swift and silent, disappearing in the oak wood on the farther shore. In a moment every voice is hushed. Not a bird calls. Not even a wren dares to utter an alarm. There is a sudden rush of wings. A merlin dashes from the thicket by the shore, catches up the dipper in its cruel claws, and, alighting on a great flat stone, in the middle of the river, it buries its merciless bill again and again in the white breast of its struggling captive. What a picture! The sunlight is full on the blue back of the beautiful little falcon, as it leans forward a little, half hiding its prey under its drooping wings. Giving a swift glance to right and left—the sparkle of its keen eyes plain to see—it tears out a little cloud of feathers that flutter lightly down, and sail away upon the stream. Again the merlin looks up. Something has startled him. He gives one glance this way. He catches sight of a figure under the alder trees. Like a flash he is gone. The dead dipper falls into the water, sailing down the river, in which but a few minutes since it was playing, full of life and happiness, the white feathers from its blood-stained gorget floating away from it at every swirl of the current; a sorrowful little heap of ruffled plumage, whirling with the whirling stream.

WINSFORD: VOICES THREE.

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On the slopes of a great hollow in the heart of Exmoor, a hot sun beats fiercely down. True that it is an April sky whose clouds and sunshine weave their changing web of lights and shadows over the landscape. True that the landscape, even yet, wears but little of the guise of springtime. But to-day no touch of east is in the air, and the smoke columns, rising slowly from the chimneys of the village, and showing so blue against the oak plantation on a distant shoulder of the moorland, are drifting slowly from the southward. From this upland country, over which the snow lay deep for two whole months, the grip of winter has been slow to loosen. But the trees and hedgerows are answering at last to the magical influence of the sunshine, and "the useful trouble of the rain." The grass of these rich meadow lands—for months past all burnt and brown, as if after a long, rainless summer—wears now its very loveliest hue. There is a fringe of pale blue violets along the edge of every woodland path. Stars of celandine are scattered over every field, and among the tangle of the withered hedge-row grasses. Marsh marigolds are gleaming in the wet earth about the roots of the alders by the river. Even at this distance, the great clumps of primroses show like points of light on the slope of the orchard by the vicarage. Surely never were there such beautiful masses of wood-sorrel as, with their vivid leaves and dainty, purple-veined flowers, brighten now the banks of every deep-worn lane.

The tall chestnut by the church, but yesterday just dusted over with fine points of gold, is now a very cloud of fresh young foliage. Each day strengthens the green hue of the larches crowning the bold spur beyond the village. Each day deepens the warm purple of fast-opening blossoms round the heads of the tall elms of the village, and the great oaks of this warm slope. Noble trees they are, these hoary patriarchs that the woodman's axe has spared. Their mighty branches, gnarled and twisted and storm-beaten, towering far up against the pale blue heaven, are shaggy with ages' growth of lichens. Moss grows thick over the furrowed rind, not of their broad stems alone, but almost of their topmost branches. In the crannies of the bark, fringed with grey-green tongues of fern, woodbine and briar and slim mountain-ash have found anchorage. Over their old arms the nuthatches wander up and down, calling to each other with that loud musical trill so characteristic of the springtime.

On every side, among the broad stumps of vanished forest monarchs, long dethroned, are springing the sturdy forms of another generation, young pines and oaks and beeches, that are doing their best to fill the places of the fallen, and although the giant sycamore that overhangs the path is still all bare and leafless, everywhere in the grass beneath its shadow, its children, tiny double blades of tender green, are springing, thousands strong.

It is a scene of marvellous beauty upon which the eye looks down from the welcome rest of this fallen tree beside the woodland path. Below, at the foot of the slope, the border line between the wild life of the covert and the order of the well-kept farm lands, runs a swift moorland stream, whose broad band of silver is broken again and again by the rude stone bridges of the village streets. Every reach of the river seems to have its several sound, that,

"Low at times, and loud at times

And changing like a poet's rhymes,"

seems, with the rush of the wind among the rocking tops, and with the songs and call-notes of a hundred birds, to fill the hollow. In the pauses of the roar of the white lasher by the mill, a roar that sinks and swells with every flaw that blows, the ear may catch now the sound of the swift current brawling over its brown pebbles, now the swirl of water round a bar of shingle, now the chafing of the stream among the alder roots, and now the soft sound of ripples on a sandy shallow. Round the broad green knoll that rises from the river, filling all the centre of the valley, and almost islanded by wandering streams, cluster the houses of the hamlet, whose white walls and brown and moss-grown roofs of thatch, whose pointed gables and quaint deep-sunk dormer windows show plainly now among sheltering elms, that in the summer-time will hide them in a very bower of green.

High over the roofs of the village, high even above the topmost trees, rises the grey tower of the church. Round its turrets a troop of daws are fluttering. Is it only fancy, or is there really a note of protest and impatience in their snatches of clear-cut speech? For weeks past these bold frequenters of the church have been piling sticks upon the turret stair, by way of foundation for their great untidy nests. They had strewn a cartload of rubbish over the floor of the belfry, when the sexton arose in his wrath and blocked up all the tower windows and the loophole lights of the stairway, so that the daws were compelled to change their quarters to the roofs of the village. But they still linger round their ancestral homestead, and one pair, determined not to quit altogether the sacred precincts that have sheltered them and theirs for generations, have established themselves in a niche behind the iron pipe of the stove. It is a hole that might just contain the nest, but the birds have thought it necessary to fill up with sticks a yard or more of the space between the chimney and the tower wall, as if by way of outworks to their fortress.

A flood of sunshine is falling at this moment on the ancient tower, on the brown thatch of the old houses, on the purple lacework of the budding elms, until the whole beautiful picture stands clear-drawn against the soft background of the far hillside, still all in shadow. The sunlight glitters on the slate roofs of houses lower down, and flashes on the winding river until every reach of it is a sheet of burnished silver. Now it brightens yet more the vivid green of the meadows, now it touches the red slopes of distant corn-lands, and now it seems to linger on a far shoulder of the moor, whose brown heath and dead grey gorse bushes, and ancient thorn trees straggling up the hill, are transfigured to a very vision of glory by the dreamy, sunlit haze.

Dream-like, too, is the quiet that broods over this peaceful valley—a quiet even deepened by those Voices Three, of the wind, and the birds, and the river. No sound of toil or traffic rises from the village, save the clink of iron in the smithy, the thud of a woodman's axe among the young alders by the water, or, still more rarely, the lumbering of a cart along one of the deep lanes that slope upward to the moor, or that wander with the winding streams. The wind that sways the oak boughs overhead has a stormy sound. But this sheltered corner under the hill, with its screen of thick-growing fir and holly, is full of the warm south, of soft and gentle airs, scented with the sweet resinous fragrance of the pines.

And all the while, louder than the rush of the wind, clearer far than the sound of the river, there float from tree to tree the happy voices of the woodland singers. Everywhere among the leafless boughs the chiff-chaffs are calling. Here and there along the slope a tree pipit, rising high above his station upon some yet wintry branch, sinks slowly downward through the sunny air, singing as he sinks, till he alights again upon his windy perch. Loud above all other sounds there strikes in now and then the whistle of a blackbird, wild and clear, and at times the yet sweeter carol of the blackcap. Rooks call hoarsely to each other as they pass, on the way to their great settlement far down the river. At times the white pigeons of the vicarage, hovering a moment in mid-air, descend like a shower of snowflakes on their dovecot. From the shelter of the old Scotch firs at the far end of the wood, where the trees have long been left untouched, come now and then the deep notes of carrion crows, low-toned, sullen, unmirthful. They are ill neighbours for all the weaker children of the wood. Later on in the season, the edge of the Punch Bowl, that great hollow beyond the oak coppice, whose rim just shows against the sky line, the hollow where the red deer are so fond of lying, will be strewn with broken eggs of black game and pheasant, the spoil of raids in the heather and the covert. And here, too, scattered under the trees, are broken ringdoves' eggs, bearing plainly the marks of those black-coated, merciless marauders. From that corner too, out of the jungle of broom, and hazel, and wild-briar, comes at intervals the crow of a pheasant—a strident and far-reaching cry, different altogether from all other woodland voices. And in every tree along the slope willow warblers are crooning, over and over, their dainty snatches of sweet, low-toned song. It is a sleepy tune; a leisurely cadence of soft sounds, suggestive of sunshine and the summer, of

"Music, that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes."