able to start before
noon; and night fell just as they reached the frontiers of the enemy's
country. A dreary place enough it was, by the wild glare of sunset. A
high tableland of heath, banked on the right by the crags and hills of
Dartmoor, and sloping away to the south and west toward the foot of the
great cone of Brent-Tor, which towered up like an extinct volcano (as
some say that it really is), crowned with the tiny church, the votive
offering of some Plymouth merchant of old times, who vowed in sore
distress to build a church to the Blessed Virgin on the first point of
English land which he should see. Far away, down those waste slopes,
they could see the tiny threads of blue smoke rising from the dens of
the Gubbings; and more than once they called a halt, to examine whether
distant furze-bushes and ponies might not be the patrols of an advancing
army. It is all very well to laugh at it now, in the nineteenth century,
but it was no laughing matter then; as they found before they had gone
two miles farther.

On the middle of the down stood a wayside inn; a desolate and
villainous-looking lump of lichen-spotted granite, with windows
paper-patched, and rotting thatch kept down by stones and straw-banks;
and at the back a rambling court-ledge of barns and walls, around which
pigs and barefoot children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the
door, rapt apparently in the contemplation of the mountain peaks which
glowed rich orange in the last lingering sun-rays, but really watching
which way the sheep on the moor were taking, stood the innkeeper, a
brawny, sodden-visaged, blear-eyed six feet of brutishness, holding up
his hose with one hand, for want of points, and clawing with the other
his elf-locks, on which a fair sprinkling of feathers might denote:
first, that he was just out of bed, having been out sheep-stealing
all the night before; and secondly, that by natural genius he had
anticipated the opinion of that great apostle of sluttishness,
Fridericus Dedekind, and his faithful disciple Dekker, which last speaks
thus to all gulls and grobians: "Consider that as those trees of cobweb
lawn, woven by spinners in the fresh May mornings, do dress the curled
heads of the mountains, and adorn the swelling bosoms of the valleys; or
as those snowy fleeces, which the naked briar steals from the innocent
sheep to make himself a warm winter livery, are, to either of them
both, an excellent ornament; so make thou accoun