at least danced up and down; and
wilder than all was the joy of our Exmoor ponies, Mrs. Senter's and
mine.

They didn't intend to let the hunt go by without them, the stanch little
sporting beasts! We hadn't the least idea what they meant to do, or
perhaps--just perhaps!--we might have stopped them; but before Mrs.
Senter and I knew what was happening to us, off we dashed on pony-back
after the hunt.

I laughed so much I could hardly keep my seat, but I did somehow, though
not very gracefully, and in about five minutes Sir Lionel's long legs
had enabled him to catch my little monster, which he grabbed by the
reins and stopped, before we'd got mixed up with the staghounds. Dick
was slower about rescuing his aunt, because his legs are shorter than
Sir Lionel's; and her pony had not the pleasant disposition of mine.
Dick vowed afterward that it spit at him.

After reading "Lorna" the Doone Valley looked rather too gentle, with
its grassy slopes, to be satisfactory to my brigand-whetted mind; and
the ruins of the Doone houses would have been disappointing, too, if it
hadn't been for Miss Audrie Browne's tale of the distant dwellings, in
the Weir Water Valley; but I liked hearing that all the hills have names
of their own, and that you can be sure you are not going to fall into a
treacherous bog, if only you see a sprig of purple heather--a good,
honest plant, which hates anything secret. Our ponies didn't need the
heather signal, though; they shied away from bogs as if by instinct,
they knew the moor so well. If we had stumbled into a pitfall, our only
hope would have been to lie quite flat, and crawl along the surface with
the same motion that you make in swimming.

It was late afternoon by the time we had seen all that the ponies wanted
us to see of the Doone Valley, and then our way led us back to Lynmouth,
by the appalling Countisbury Hill; on to Parracombe, Blackmore Gate,
Challacombe, romantic little Simonsbath (sacred to the memory of Sigmund
the dragon-slayer, and two outlaws, of whom Tom Faggus, of the
"Strawberry horse," was one), and pretty, historic Exford, and so to
Dunster. A beautiful road it was to the eye, but not always to the tire,
and half the hills of England seemed to have lined up in a procession.
But Apollo smiled in his bonnet at them all, and appeared rather pleased
than otherwise to show what he could do.

When we came into Dunster it was almost dark--just the beautiful hour
when the air se