e whole air with misty rain, and I
was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his
god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the
tumultuous surface.

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer
and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which
they will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When
compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over
the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to
other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I
thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down
by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which
was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the
middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the
same reason that I do.

[Illustration]

THE DARTMOOR PONIES, OR THE WANDERINGS OF THE HORSE TRIBE

(FROM "THROUGH MAGIC GLASSES.")

BY ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY.

[Illustration]

I want you to take a journey with me which I took in imagination a few
days ago, as I lay on my back on the sunny moor and watched the
Dartmoor ponies.

It was a calm misty morning one day last week, giving promise of a
bright and sunny day, when I started off for a long walk across the
moor to visit the famous stone-circles, many of which are to be found
not far off the track, called Abbot's Way, leading from Buckfast
Abbey, on the Dart, to the Abbey of Tavistock, on the Tavy.

My mind was full of the olden times as I pictured to myself how, seven
hundred years or more ago, some Benedictine monk from Tavistock Abbey,
in his black robe and cowl, paced this narrow path on his way to his
Cistercian brethren at Buckfast, meeting some of them on his road as
they wandered over the desolate moor in their white robes and black
scapularies in search of stray sheep. For the Cistercians were
shepherds and wool-weavers, while the Benedictines devoted themselves
to learning, and the track of about twenty-five miles from one abbey
to the other, which still remains, was worn by the members of the two
communities and their dependents, the only variety in whose lives
consisted probably in these occasional visits one to the other.

Yet even these monks belonged to modern times compared to the ancient
Britons who raised the stone-circles, and buried their dead in the
barrows scattered