once, when we stopped a
moment at a place where Sir Lionel wasn't sure of the way, I asked a boy
on a rough pony the names of some trees we had passed. "H'ash and green
h'elm, miss," said he. It _was_ a blow!

Toward eleven, the sun had drunk up the cold mist, and the moor basked
in heat. We were in an empty world, save for a cottage now and then, and
a Cyclopean wall of stones loosely piled one upon another. Yet this was
the main road from Ashburton to Princetown! Apollo glided along a
desolate white way between creamy and silver grasses artistically
intermingled, and burning, golden gorse, which caught the sun. The
splendid, dignified loneliness of the moor was like the retreat chosen
by a hermit god! There may be only twenty square miles of moor, but it
feels like a hundred.

Hexworthy and the Forest Inn, which we came to in a valley, were
curiously Swiss, all but the ancient cross which made me think of Eden
Phillpotts's "American Prisoner." How can I say an "ancient" cross,
though, when the _really_ old things on the moor began not only before
Christ, but before history--the stone circles, the cairns and the
cromlechs, the kistvaen and the barrows! The hut circles, where a
forgotten people used to live, are strewn in thousands over the moor,
and cooking utensils are sometimes dug up, even now; so you see,
everything isn't discovered yet. The people hadn't any metal to work
with, poor creatures, until the Bronze Age, and they clothed themselves
in skins, which I suppose their dressmakers and tailors made when the
sheep and cows that wore them first had been cut up and eaten. I wonder
if girls were pretty in those days, or men handsome, and if anyone
cared? But I suppose knowing the difference between ugliness and beauty
is as old as Adam and Eve. If Eve hadn't been pretty, Adam wouldn't have
looked at her, but would have waited in the hope of something better.

The first sight of Princetown only intensified the loneliness of the
moor, somehow, partly because it loomed so gray and grim, partly,
perhaps, because we knew it to be a prison town. The dark buildings
looked as much a natural growth of the moor as those ruined temples on
the horizon, which were tors. It was almost impossible to believe that
Plymouth was only fifteen miles away. And the sombreness and gloom of
the melancholy place increased instead of diminished as we drew nearer
to it, after leaving behind us the pleasant oasis of Tor Bridge and its
lit