e river disappeared at sight of it, hurrying away
from its frown, and as the stream vanished all the dainty charm of the
landscape fled, too. We saw the moor towering toward us, stern and
barren, with that great watch-tower of Nature's pinning it to the sky.

Moorland ponies raced to and fro, mad with the joy of some game they
were playing, and they were not afraid of us. I should think the live
things of the moor were afraid of nothing that could come to them out of
the world beyond, for that pungent air breathes "courage," and the gray
granite, breaking through the poor coat of grass, dares the eyes that
look at it not to be brave.

Near the moorland ponies--on Holne Moor--we came to the strangest
reservoir you could dream of. It was vast, and blue as a block fallen
out of the sky; and once, Sir Lionel said, it had been a lake, though
now it gives water to the prison town. An old road used to run through
it; and to this day you can see the bridge under water. The story is
that strange forms cross that bridge at night. I'm sure it's true, for
anything could happen on the moor, and of course it swarms with pixies.
You believe that, don't you? Well, anyway, you would if you saw the
moor.

The next tor was nameless for us, but it was even finer than Sharp Tor.
After seeing Stonehenge I felt so certain it must be Druidical that it
was disappointing to hear it wasn't--that all such theories about the
tors had "exploded." Afterward there were lots of tors; and there were
tin mines, too, not far from our wild, desolate road--tin mines that
have always been worked, they say, since the days of the Phoenicians.
I should have been more interested in thinking about them, however, if
we hadn't just then begun gliding down a hill which, from the top,
looked as if it might go straight through to China. My toes felt as if
they'd been done up in curl-papers for years. But there was a savage joy
in the creepiness of it, and Apollo "chunk-chunked" sturdily down, in a
nice, dependable way, toward a lonely village, which I felt sure was
entirely populated by Eden Phillpotts people. He, and the other authors
who write about the moor, invariably make their leading characters have
"primitive passions," so I thought perhaps the faces of the moor folk
would be wilder and stranger, and have more meaning than other civilized
faces. But all those I saw looked just like everybody else, and I was so
disappointed! They even dropped their "h's"; and