l, leaving Wattern Tor to the left. Beneath its
ragged ridges, in a vast granite amphitheatre, twinkled the cool
birth-springs of the little Wallabrook, and the water here looked leaden
under shade, here sparkled with silver at the margin of a cloud shadow,
here shone golden bright amid the dancing heads of the cotton-grass
under unclouded sunlight. The mist wreaths had wholly departed before
noon, and only a few vast mountains of summer gold moved lazily along
the upper chambers of the air. A huge and solitary shadow overtook the
man and spread itself directly about him, then swept onwards; infinite
silence encompassed him; once from a distant hillside a voice cried to
him, where women and children moved like drab specks and gathered the
ripe whortleberries that now wove purple patterns into the fabric of the
Moor; but he heeded not the cry; and other sound there was none save the
occasional and mournful note of some lonely yellowhammer perched upon a
whin. Into the prevalent olive-brown of the heath there had now stolen
an indication of a magic change at hand, for into the sober monotone
crept a gauzy shadow, a tremor of wakening flower-life, half pearl, half
palest pink, yet more than either. Upon the immediate foreground it
rippled into defined points of blossom, which already twinkled through
all the dull foliage; in the middle distance it faded; afar off it
trembled as a palpable haze of light under the impalpable reeling of the
summer air. A week or less would see the annual miracle peformed again
and witness that spacious and solemn region in all the amethystine
glories of the ling. Fiercely hot grew the day, and the distances, so
distinct through mist rifts and wreaths in the clearness of early
morning, now retreated--mountain upon mountain, wide waste on waste--as
the sun climbed to the zenith. Detail vanished, the Moor stretched
shimmering to the horizon; only now and again from some lofty point of
his pilgrimage did the traveller discover chance cultivation through a
dip in the untamed region he traversed. Then to the far east and north,
the map of fertile Devon billowed and rolled in one enormous misty
mosaic,--billowed and rolled all opalescent under the dancing atmosphere
and July haze, rolled and swept to the sky-line, where, huddled by
perspective into the appearance of density, hung long silver tangles of
infinitely remote and dazzling cloud against the blue.

From that distant sponge in the central was