and the distant ridge of which is crowned by the
petrified wild beast that is known to the wild
huntsman's hounds as Row Tor, that the crow
peeringly, as if a murdered man lay there, hovers
above the strangest place in all the moor—the
Wistman's wood—that humble remnant of the
great forest through whose green glades the wild
deer leaped, and whose broad green boughs
shed blossoms on the helmeted heads of the
knights of Richard of the Lion Heart. The
dwarfed oaks in this enchanted wood, that
seem blighted by some curse, are festooned
with ivy and matted with moss. They spread
their matted heads above a thorny adder-
haunted confusion of granite blocks, crushed
close, and kept down by the tyrannous moor
winds. These stunted trees, feathered with
fern, and encumbered with choking parasites,
have been struggling for a livelihood in this
forlorn place ever since the Conqueror sprang from
his boat upon the Hastings shore. Old
records prove that beyond dispute. When the
Briton wore his collar of gold and wielded his
bronze axe for a sceptre, they were here;
when the Briton was a mere hunted fugitive,
cowering in the brake when the Roman trumpets
sounded over the tors, these trees were still
crowding together in abject submission to the
rude elements. The Plantagenets passed, and
the Tudors, and the Stuarts, and still the wood,
under the curse, struggled on. The average
height of the trees is only ten or twelve feet,
but many reach only the stature of a man.
The local saying is that, in Wistman's wood,
there are five hundred oaks five hundred feet
high, meaning that each tree averages one foot
in height. The antiquarian theorists have, of
course, been hard at this wood, whittling out
paradoxes. A insists that this was one of
those "groves in stony places" mentioned in
Scripture as dedicated to Baal and Ashtoreth.
In such a rocky valley the priests of Baal
may have shouted to their god and cut
themselves with flints, as when Elisha mocked the
tardiness of their deity. B is equally sure that
this was a grove of Woden, who still hunts
with his spectral hounds over the quaking
morass where even the fox can scarcely pass.
The Phoenician tin streamers, and the fugitive
Britons who hid here, brought these wild
traditions to the moor, and there they still linger in
cramped growth, like the crabbed knotted trees
of the Wistman's wood. By the old Cyclopean
bridges that the Britons piled across the Dart in
these places, by the overthrown cromlechs, and
logans long fallen from their mystic balance,
the legends of Odin and his hell hounds still
linger, fitting the place as well as the
wallflower does the ruin, or the mushroom ring the
meadow. Here alone, like the last of an otherwise
extinct race, the traditions of an old mythology
remain, and will remain perhaps for ever.
They befit the blighted forest, the No Man's
Land, the howling waste, the eternal wilderness,
the primeval barrens of Dartmoor, and should
be studied on the spot where the heather is most
purple, the moss greenest and softest, among
spectral tors filmed with shadows, where the
streams are blue as the sky when the rocks are
grey in the sunshine, or, better still, by the
swamp where the snipe calls and the bittern
booms, when the streams, swollen by rain, come
sounding down the rocky valleys.

It is a singular thing how some places seem
set apart by nature for scenes of suffering, flight,
tribulation, and sorrow; and to the wounded and
the unhappy, the defeated and the oppressed,
these rocks were always ramparts. The Briton
fled here from the Roman, the Briton fled here
from the Saxon, and the Saxon fled here from
the Norman. Even later, in the French war, ten
thousand French prisoners were kept in the great
walled pound at Princes Town, shut in by double
walls, a military road, endless sentinels, and
an enceinte of ceaseless mist and rain. The
sentries then had large bells, which they rang
at intervals during great fogs, to warn each
other, to alarm the Napoleonists, and to guide
belated travellers. When peace came, the
prison, for a long time a mere landmark, was
turned into a naphtha manufactory. In 1850,
it again became a prison, and now, once more,
the escaped convict occasionally skulks behind
the Dartmoor tors, and seeks shelter with the fox
and the snake, fitting companions, where the
hounded Briton, his noble forefather, once fled
the Roman spears. There in the morass, with
the plover screaming over head, the Artful
Dodger may still stave out a day or two, safe
from the weary crank, and the cruel toil of the
granite quarry.

A flap of the crow's wing drives the inquisitive
bird through the blue Devonshire air from
the lonely convict prison to Fitz's Well, whose
votive granite slabs still bear the initials of
John Fitz, of Fitzford, near Tavistock, and the
date 1568. They are a record of Devonshire
superstition, being placed over a spring by a knight
and his lady, in Elizabeth's reign; one day,
pixy led, they lost their way on the moor, and
when worn out and hopeless, came suddenly, to
their joy, upon these refreshing waters.

These pixies, who live in the clefts of the
granite rocks, occupy an important place in
Devonshire mythology. The peasantry drop
pins or other offerings when they pass their
haunts, and children, dreading lest elfin mothers
should adopt them, do not venture near pixy
haunted places after sunset. The pixies hide
their gold among the tors. They are heard on
dark nights galloping by on horses they have
borrowed from the farmers, or are heard pounding
their cyder in Sheeps Tor caverns.

Far above the hut circles and stone avenues of
Black Tor, the crow passes silently till he comes
to Fox Tor, and there he alights with a full
swoop upon a legend of Edward the Third's
reign. The story goes that at this time, when
Cressy was talked of as Inkerman is now, John
Childe, of Plymstoke, a knight of fortune, who
was devotedly fond of hunting, was here
benighted. Mists rose, pixies lured him on with
false lights, snow set in in blinding flakes, there
was no help and no shelter, so John Childe,
hard driven, stabbed his horse, cut the poor beast
open, and crept into its bowels for shelter. But
all in vain. That night he perished. The monks
of Tavistock, hearing of the mysterious