ll around abounds in objects of great
natural beauty and historic interest.

Exeter, the cathedral city which was the scene of Ordulph's Samson-like
feat, is thirty-three miles away by a road that crosses the very heart
of Dartmoor, a wild, beautiful highway that rises in places to well over
1,200 feet; and sixteen-and-a-half miles to the south is Plymouth, from
which Tavistock is easily reached by train.

There are few places in the West Country more attractive than this old
town in the moors, so richly endowed by time and by nature.

[Illustration: _Tavistock Abbey_]

[Illustration]

THE MIDNIGHT HUNTER OF THE MOOR

Running across the southern part of the heart of wild Dartmoor is a
very ancient road. "The Abbot's Way" they call it, and antiquaries hold
varied opinions as to when it was made, and even as to where it led to
and from. To-day, much of this old trackway has gone back to nature and
cannot be distinguished from the rugged moorland across which it passes,
but some stretches of it survive in a strange green path marked here and
there by a boundary stone or a much-weathered Celtic cross.

But the old stories--tales perhaps even older than the road--tell that
the Abbot's Way is the favourite hunting ground of the Wish Hounds or
Yell Hounds, an eerie spectre-pack that hunts across the wildest parts
of the moor on moonless nights.

Strange, gruesome tales are told by those who, benighted or lost in the
fog, have stumbled home through the dark of a winter night across the
grim moorland. They tell--half dazed with fear--as they reach at last
some house and welcome human companionship, of the wild baying of the
hounds that drifted through the murk night to their ears, or of the
sudden vision of the pack passing at whirlwind speed across bog and
marsh urged onward by a grim black figure astride a giant dark horse
from whose smoking nostrils came flame and fire.

The description of this figure, "The Midnight Hunter of the Moor,"
seldom varies, although stories of the Wish Hounds differ from time
to time.

Some say that they are headless, and that their blood-curdling cries
seem to emerge from a phosphorescent glow of evil smoke that hovers
about the place where the head should be. Others describe them as gaunt,
dark beasts with huge white fangs and lolling red tongues.

Up on the grim wild moors it is not hard at midnight, through the
roaring of the wind, or in the stillness of a calm night broken