w
Board, under Lord Derby's Government). In the course of a considerable
part of the route, the contrast of wild moorland and high cultivation
may be found only divided by the carriage-way.

At length, descending a steep hill, we came in sight of a view--of which
Exmoor and its kindred district in North Devon affords many--a deep
gorge, at whose precipitous base a trout-stream rolled along, gurgling
and plashing, and winding round huge masses of white spar. The far bank
sometimes extended out into natural meadows, where red cattle and wild
ponies grazed, and sometimes rose precipitously. At one point, where
both banks were equally steep and lofty, the far side was covered by a
plantation with a cover of under-wood; but no trees of sufficient
magnitude to deserve the name of a wood. This is a spot famous in the
annals of a grand sport that soon will be among things of the past--Wild
Stag Hunting. In this wood more than once the red monarch of Exmoor has
been roused, and bounded over the rolling plains beyond, amid the shouts
of excited hunters and the deep cry of the hounds, as with a burring
scent they dashed up the steep breast of the hill.

But there was no defiant stag there that day; so on we trotted on our
shaggy sure-footed nags, beneath a burning sun--a sun that sparkled on
the flowing waters as they gleamed between far distant hills, and threw
a golden glow upon the fading tints of foliage and herbage, and cast
deep shadows from the white overhanging rocks.

Next we came to the deep pool that gives the name to Simon's Bath, where
some unhappy man of that name, in times when deer were more plentiful
than sheep, drowned himself for love, or in madness, or both--long
before roads, farms, turnip crops, a school, and a church were dreamed
of on Exmoor. Here fences give signs of habitation and cultivation. A
rude, ancient bridge, with two arches of different curves, covered with
turf, without side battlements or rails, stretches across the stream,
and leads to a small house built for his own occupation by the father of
Mr. Knight, pending the completion of a mansion of which the unfinished
walls of one wing rise like a dismantled castle from the midst of a
grove of trees and ornamented shrubs.

A series of gentle declivities, plantations, a winding, full-flowing
stream, seem only to require a suitable edifice and the hand of an
artist gardener to make, at comparatively trifling expense, an abode
unequalled in luxu