feet high, some to the great kitchen of the prison
and to the different workshops. About one third of the prisoners marched
outside the walls by the lower entrance, for the prison stands on a
hill, at the foot of which stretches the most forsaken and grisly waste
in all Dartmoor.

The task of the convicts for two hundred years had been the reclamation
of this wide waste, which was called "The Farm." The French prisoners of
war taken in the Napoleonic wars that ended with Waterloo had dug
trenches to drain the waste. The American prisoners of the War of 1812
had laid roadways through the marsh. The Irish rebels of six generations
had toiled in the tear-scalded footsteps of the French and American
captives. And all the time the main or "stock" supply of English
criminals, numbering usually about four hundred men, had spent their
weary years in toiling and broiling at "The Farm."

Standing at the lower gate of the prison, from which a steep road
descended to the marsh looking over "The Farm," it was hard to see
anything like a fair return for such continued and patient labor. Deep
trenches filled with claret-colored water drained innumerable patches of
sickly vegetation. About a hundred stunted fruit trees and as many
bedraggled haystacks were all that broke the surface line.

As the gangs of convicts, numbering about twenty each, marched out of
the lower gate on this dull morning, they turned their eyes, each gang
in the same surprised way as that which preceded, on a small group of
men who were working just outside the prison wall.

To the left of the gate, on the sloping side of the hill, was a
quadrangular space of about thirty by twenty yards, round which was
built a low wall of evidently great antiquity. The few courses of stones
were huge granite boulders and slabs torn and rolled from the hillside.
There was no gateway or break in the square; to enter the inclosure one
must climb over the wall, which was easy enough to do.

Inside the square was a rough heap of granite, a cairn, gray with
lichens, in the centre of which stood, or rather leaned, a tall square
block of granite, like a dolmen. So great was the age of this strange
obelisk that the lichens had encrusted it to the top. The stone had once
stood upright; but it now leaned toward the marsh, the cairn having
slowly yielded on the lower side.

Around this ancient monument were working four men in the gray and black
tweed of the convicts; and it was at t