The dwellers in the picturesque homesteads scattered at wide intervals over this countryside would hardly be content to hear these hills of theirs called a wilderness. But up yonder against the sky line, with grey clouds trailing low along its topmost ridges, is a brow of the wildest wilderness in England, and these hillside pastures are the fringe of Dartmoor. One might well imagine, too, looking out over this beautiful landscape, that the lines of these West Country yeomen were fallen to them in pleasant places. And, indeed, fortunes have been made here in the "good old days," when bread was dear and wages were at starvation point. But times are hard. And there are sons of the soil here now working for hire on other farms, whose sires held broad acres of their own.

The wayfarer who, making his way up from Chagford towards the moorland, should chance to pass this little settlement, might well pause in wonder as he passed the gate, and stand and rub his eyes in doubt whether it was a dream or not. So unlike the old country is this log hut and all about it that a settler from the Bush might, if he saw it, almost fancy himself upon his native heath. The very trees that flourish here are strange. Among shrubs that have been brought from the slopes of the Himalaya, grow tall bamboos whose feathery crowns look over the topmost ridges of the roof. And yet on every hand there are suggestions of the moorland—those stacks of peat, with their picturesque coverings of furze and straw; that granite roller, so thickly set with crystals of felspar. The very props of the clothes-line are untrimmed birch poles from the wood, wearing still their silvery bark. It is moorland earth that made those rhododendron thickets so broad and strong. It is moorland air that has draped the trees with shaggy lichens, adding centuries of age to oaks yet hardly in their prime, and lending to the sturdy fruit bushes of the borders the air of hoary patriarchs. Furze bushes, in whose thorny depths the yellow-hammers build in springtime, and willow-warblers weave their domes of grass, flourish in the garden precincts. And all the banks are overgrown with a green jungle of fern and broom and bilberry—children of the moorland, stealing down to regain their lost dominions.

This is winter by the calendar. But it is a day of clear shining after rain. The air is full of the sound of streams—of the roar of moorland torrents, of the deeper voice of the river plunging through the wooded gorge below. The stems of the tall birches in the wood below the house, still wet with last night's rain, shine as if they were sheathed in silver, and their branches glitter as if every twig were hung with silver beads—as, indeed, they are, the silver of the clinging raindrops.

A graceful, yellow-breasted wagtail, still lingering here when the rest of her kindred are across the sea, flutters down now and then from the top of the dovecot to catch the flies that are sunning themselves against the wall. On the roof above the pigeons sit in conclave, their slumbrous voices just in keeping with the music of the streams. In his cage against the wall of the hut I can hear, now and then, a raven stirring. He is a silent bird for the most part:

Some day he will talk, and then perhaps we shall learn what strange things he has been hoarding in the dark places of his memory. Again and again last night he woke me by rattling the bars of his prison, or by sharpening that great bill of his against his perch. I doubt if he slept a wink before daylight. It was strange to hear him thus in the darkness. At times, too, I heard the mellow voices of the owls, sounding clear above the rush of the streams and the patter of rain upon the roof.

Birds pass and repass now in the sunlight. At times the pigeons sweep down from their rest overhead, with sudden clatter of wings, and as they wheel round the house they rouse into speech for a moment the taciturn jackdaw, whose cage adjoins the prison of the yet more silent raven.

From far up the moorland sounds the hoarse clamour of crows. And magpies go by, carefully keeping clear of the precincts, as if they were aware that the Master of the House had a keen eye and a steady hand. But they might lay aside their fears. No beast or bird is vermin in this corner of Arcadia. No jay or magpie ever suffered here the penalty of evil deeds or tarnished reputation. One night the Master of the House was roused by the sounds of a slight scuffle outside. An owl had swooped on a rat in a corner of the verandah, and through the wooden wall of the hut was plainly heard the rustle of feathers as the bird spread its broad wings over the body of its victim. Weasels find sanctuary under the very flooring of the shanty, and stoats may hunt the covers at their will without fear of trap or gun. The Hunt know well that there is no surer spot to find a fox than the larch plantations up yonder on the hill. And there, too, the badgers pursue in safety the even tenour of their harmless lives.

When the larches were first planted, and were but just struggling to get their heads above the hillside jungle, grasshopper-warblers hid their nests on the ground among them, and chats, and tree-pipits. A few years later blackbirds came and built among the branches. Now the ring-doves trust their frail platforms of stick to the strong young arms. And in a year or two sparrow-hawks and magpies will build in the green tops. The trees have already killed the grass about their feet, and the bare earth beneath their shadow is a favourite haunt of the woodcock.

But in spite of crows and magpies, stoats and weasels, and all the creatures of the wild that are too often branded as vermin, there is no want of pheasants in the cover. And the Master of the House, with his man behind him, and three eager little terriers dancing at his heels, has but this moment left me to look for a woodcock. The dogs are much keener for the sport than their owner, master of woodcraft though he be. He is always readier to use his field-glass than his gun. Many a time, as he stood motionless, gun in hand, has a rabbit cantering by paused to look up at him, or a woodcock settled near, and come and gone unharmed. The moor-folk here are sportsmen born, with the keenest eyes for the whereabouts of hare or pheasant, and far too much given to the setting of gins. The Master of the House—who says that half the pheasants he shoots have already lost a leg—showed me yesterday an illustrated price-list of the traps made by a man who boasts of supplying the Queen and the Prince of Wales, and who reckons in his long list of noble patrons not a few distinguished names that we have been accustomed to think of as belonging to champions of the "brute" creation. Yet here were not only rat-traps and rabbit-traps, traps for foxes and even for tigers, but traps—of horrible device, and certain to inflict the most cruel tortures—for killing hawks and herons. Surely, if some keepers are still ignorant and brutal, better things might have been expected of their masters. And his must be a mean and sordid soul who would grudge the kingfisher his meed of beauty—even supposing that so rare a bird can do any appreciable amount of harm. Yet in this list of fiendish enginry is figured a kingfisher-trap. This the purchaser is directed "to screw to a stump in the water where the birds resort, and place a piece of wood on the fork for them to alight on, or a small fish may be used as bait."

In the last few days, when from other parts of the island have come reports of bitter weather, of rough winds and frosty airs, the climate here has been almost summer-like. Yesterday, as I sat in the verandah, more than one wasp, roused by the sunshine from her winter slumber, was buzzing among the rafters overhead. But, as the day wore on, there were signs of a change. Ominous-looking clouds began to gather up from the southward. And, in the late afternoon, as we rode slowly up the steep track towards the moor, there came now and then a spurt of wind and rain.

The road, like so many of the Dartmoor roads, was fenced by rude walls of granite, built of blocks so ponderous as to suggest that only giants could have reared such cyclopean masonry. Every chink between the stones was fringed with fern and bilberry. Clinging lichens made the grey faces of the granite greyer still; while others, nestling in mossy hollows, were tipped with scarlet, recalling the vivid touches of colour over the eyes of a moorfowl.

High up on the moorland, looking down on one of the most beautiful of its many river valleys, we came on a great stone circle, known to the moor men as the Roundy Pound—a double ring of unhewn, irregular blocks of granite, shaggy with ages' growth of lichens, and with a single thorn tree standing in the midst, mantled from base to crest with grey—a hoary patriarch, like the lone priest of long-forgotten rites. Far below lay the valley of the Teign, winding away into the hills. To the right rose the sad-coloured slopes of the moorland, here darkened with dead bracken, and there brightened by pale sheets of withered grass. On the left was a birch wood, with a rare purple bloom upon its leafless boughs, like the purple of far hills at sunset. Here and there a dead birch stem glimmered white against the dark. And about the feet of the bare trees was a wealth of colour almost more marvellous still—the rich brown, lustrous velvet of mosses and dead leaves, the fiery red of withered brake fern, beaten down by wind and rain. Below the wood, on a little island in the river, was a group of old Scotch firs, with the water gleaming white between the ruddy branches. Over all there stretched away the far-reaching wastes of the moorland, lifeless, desolate, with a fringe of mist along the sky line.

Night closed in grey and wet. As the hours passed, I woke at times to hear the rush of the rain, the growing sounds of multitudinous streams, the deepening voice of the river roaring through its wooded passes. Morning broke on a day of undoubted Dartmoor weather—no gleam of sunshine anywhere; cold, clinging mists on every hand; grey sheets of rain stalking like ghosts across the landscape.

The day was at its very worst when the keeper, who had been at work since daylight rescuing trout that, in struggling up the swollen streams, had got themselves into difficulties in unexpected shallows, came up to the house and stood for a minute in the rain, the water streaming from every outlying point in his figure, and looked inquiringly at the Master of the House. The Master groaned. But he threw on his old shooting-coat, picked up a handful of cartridges, and took his gun from the corner, and the two men sallied out into the rain.

It was, in truth, a dreary morning. There was no sunshine now to light the dripping birch stems. But even under that grey sky there was marvellous beauty in the bare boughs, in the brown oak leaves, in the streaming ferns on the green bank below. Under the bank was a new gleam of silver, where the swollen brook went swirling by under a grey brow of granite. Hour after hour fell the pitiless rain. Every thread of water on the hillside was a headlong torrent. The road below the house was deep under a rushing flood.

It was late when the little shooting party came back, their coming heralded by the screaming of a troop of jays that apparently kept pace with them as they plodded through the underwood. But the birds were not inveighing against the sportsmen. When my friend returned, he told me that as he passed under a pollard oak an owl flew out, almost brushing him with its wings. The jays, who were hanging about among the thickets on the edge of the wood, espied it in a moment. And, raising a hue and cry that was caught up by every finch and tit and blackbird within hearing, they chased the bewildered bird from tree to tree, scolding and storming, and buffeting it with their wings. Earlier in the afternoon a rabbit passed, unnoticed by the dogs, not running, but leaping, across the wood; and close at its heels a weasel, following in hot pursuit.

The rain was slackening a little as we turned into the hut. But a heavy fog was closing in from the moor, blotting out even the near woodland with its wall of grey. Pleasant, indeed, after the mist and the rain was the glow of lamplight. And pleasanter still the glow of roaring oak logs, as we sat that night, each with a terrier on his knee, before the great wood fire. The dogs have taken kindly to the casual stranger, and one of them in particular is fond of sitting by me on a chair at meal times, resting her head on my arm in the most engaging manner. The two are on the best of terms for the most part, but a little attention paid to one is apt to lead to trouble with the other. I am told that there is sometimes a good deal of jealousy shown in the retrieving of a rabbit—a circumstance which, as may readily be guessed, does not tend to improve the condition of the game. And the slippers which we threw to distant corners of the hut for the dogs to bring back to us suffered severely in the bringing.

As we sat by the fire I heard something of the dangers of the moor, and of the reality of getting lost at night or in a Dartmoor fog. The oldest hand, said the Master of the House, would be helpless in such a fog as now lay round the house. A good plan, he added, is to follow a stream if you are fortunate enough to find one. Sooner or later you are sure to come to a house. He himself was on the moor once, with two companions, far away from any path, when a dense mist came on. After long walking, he happened, by great good fortune, on the wall that bounded his own common, and came at length to a familiar gate that he knew was only half a mile from home.

The three wanderers drew a breath of relief. They were all right now. The haunting fear of having to pass a night upon the moor, as many a lost wayfarer has done, was forgotten in a moment. With confident steps they marched through the mist straight down the slope towards this bungalow. But after going steadily for three hours, with a gradually growing conviction that something after all must be wrong, they found themselves back at the same wall, and at the very identical gate. They had been walking in a circle—an experience only too familiar to travellers who have lost their way in the desert. They now followed the wall until it turned abruptly down the hill. My friend then walked close to it, while the others kept abreast of him, at a distance of a hundred yards or so, that they might avoid a bog which skirted the enclosure. In this way, shouting to each other now and then, they reached here in safety, not having seen each other since they parted company.

Another man, well known in the district—a man who rather prides himself on his acquaintance with Dartmoor—will not soon be allowed to forget how he set off on horseback one day in the mist, taking a short cut across the moor, by which he expected in half an hour to strike the Princetown road, and how, after an hour and a half of pretty hard riding, he too, found himself at the spot from which he had started.