mountains which double Ben Nevis in height, and, with the exception of
the Murray Gates in Australia, and a glen in Madeira, whose name I have
forgotten, I have never seen among them the equal of some of the
northern passes of Dartmoor for gloomy magnificence. For I consider
that scenery depends not so much on height as on abruptness.

It is an evil, depressing place. Far as the eye can reach up the glen
and to the right it is one horrid waste of grey granite; here and there
a streak of yellow grass or a patch of black bog; not a tree nor a
shrub within the sky-line. On a hot summer's day it is wearisome enough
for the lonely angler to listen to the river crawling lazily through
the rocks that choke his bed, mingled with the clocking of some
water-moved boulder, and the chick-chick of the stonechat, or the
scream of the golden plover overhead. But on a wild winter's evening,
when day is fast giving place to night, and the mist shrouds the hill,
and the wild wind is rushing hoarse through tor and crag, it becomes
awful and terrible in the extreme.

On just such a night as that, at that time when it becomes evident that
the little light we have had all day is about to leave us, a lonely
watcher was standing by the angry swelling river in the most desolate
part of the pass, at a place where a vast confusion of formless rocks
crosses the stream, torturing it into a hundred boiling pools and
hissing cascades.

He stood on the summit of a cairn close to the river, and every now and
then, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked eastward through the
driving rain, as though expecting some one who came not. But at length,
grown tired of watching, he with an oath descended to a sheltered
corner among the boulders, where a smouldering peat-fire was giving out
more smoke than heat, and, crouching over it, began to fan the embers
with his hat.

He was a somewhat short, though powerful man, in age about forty, very
dark in complexion, with black whiskers growing half over his chin. His
nose was hooked, his eyes were black and piercing, and his lips thin.
His face was battered like an old sailor's, and every careless,
unstudied motion of his body was as wild and reckless as could be.
There was something about his TOUTE ENSEMBLE, in short, that would have
made an Australian policeman swear to him as a convict without the
least hesitation.

There were redeeming points in the man's face, too. There was plenty of
determination, f