le a cold blue-grey mist was creeping up the
valley.

There are some places--the Castle of Elsinore, for instance--that seem
to have an amazing and incomprehensible gift of resisting civilization.
They may be brought up to date, and trimmed, and filled with
inappropriate people, and everything else done that should spoil them,
but in spite of it all they do not for a moment look as if any modern
extraneous objects had a meaning for them. They belong to their own day
and its manner, and to no other.

The same sort of feeling hovers about Tavy Cleave, and a great sense of
the mystery that here more, there less, broods over the moor. But there
is no suggestion as to who it is that the moor has most truly and
absolutely belonged to, nor even the region of time: only the feeling
that the valley is, in a finer than the usual sense, haunted.

As a valley Tavy Cleave is very beautiful, with its steep sides and
clear rushing stream and red granite rocks, half in and half out of the
river, that have a charm they entirely lose when once away from the
water. Mr Widgery shows how admirable they are in their proper place,
with their reflections quivering beneath them. Sometimes a kind of black
moss grows upon them, and tiny bits of white lichen, giving together a
curious tortoiseshell look. Above, the hill-sides are covered with
heather and broom and whortleberries among masses of loose rocks, and
now and again there is the vivid green of a patch of bog. The great
masses of rocks crowning the separate points on the hill-side, like
ruined rock-castles, add to the air of mystery.

Looking to the west from above the Cleave, one sees--as from any
distance round one sees--the most characteristic height of Brent Tor,
with the tiny church on the top. It is not that the tor is so very high,
but in some astonishing way it always seems to appear as a landmark,
north, south, east, or west, when one imagines it to be absolutely out
of range. The sides are steep and rocky, and the church stands 'full
bleak and weather-beaten, all-alone as it were, forsaken, whose
churchyard doth hardly afford depth of earth to bury the dead; yet
doubtless they rest there as securely as in sumptuous St Peter's until
the day of Doom.'

The story told of the church is that a man once almost gave himself up
for lost--some say in a storm, others in an impenetrable, unending
fog--in the Channel, and vowed that, if he ever came safe to shore, he
would build a chur