te, from Cranmere, mother of
moorland rivers, the man presently noted wrinkles of pure gold trickling
down a hillside two miles off. Here sunshine touched the river Taw,
still an infant thing not far advanced on the journey from its fount;
but the play of light upon the stream, invisible save for this finger of
the sun, indicated to the solitary that he approached his destination.
Presently he stood on the side of lofty Steeperton and surveyed that
vast valley known as Taw Marsh, which lies between the western foothills
of Cosdon Beacon and the Belstone Tors to the north. The ragged manes of
the latter hills wind through the valley in one lengthy ridge, and
extend to a tremendous castellated mass of stone, by name Oke Tor.

This erection, with its battlements and embrasures, outlying scarps and
counterscarps, remarkably suggests the deliberate and calculated
creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of
Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs
through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it
rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no
greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby
with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was
puckered with brown tracts of naked soil, and seamed and scarred with
peat-cuttings. Here and there drying turfs were propped in pairs and
dotted the hillsides; emerald patches of moss jewelled the prevailing
sobriety of the valley, a single curlew, with rising and falling
crescendos of sound, flew here and there under needless anxiety, and far
away on White Hill and the enormous breast of Cosdon glimmered grey
stone ghosts from the past,--track-lines and circles and pounds,--the
work of those children of the mist who laboured here when the world was
younger, whose duty now lay under the new-born light of the budding
heath. White specks dotted the undulations where flocks roamed free; in
the marsh, red cattle sought pasture, and now was heard the
jingle-jangle of a sheep-bell, and now the cry of bellowing kine.

Like a dark incarnation of suffering over this expansive scene passed
Clement Hicks to the meeting with John Grimbal. His unrest was
accentuated by the extreme sunlit peace of the Moor, and as he sat on
Steeperton and gazed with dark eyes into the marshes below, there
appeared in his face the battlefield of past struggles, the graves of
past ho