50 A Night on Dartmoor. [\!AN. 



bian desert. Thick leaden clouds sailed slowly above my head, a 

 drowsy heaviness weighed on the air, the sands scorched my feet like 

 fire. Spent with fatigue I looked round me for shelter. There was 

 none. I then prayed for but one little drop of water to moisten my 

 baked lips, and relieve the thirst that drunk up my blood, but my voice 

 half choked me in the utterance. Just at this crisis I heard a strange 

 hurtling in the air, and, gazing far into the distance, beheld, on the 

 horizon's verge, a gigantic column, whose head was hidden among the 

 clouds, approaching, in superhuman grandeur, towards me. It was the 

 tornado, the Eblis of the physical creation ! On onwards it advanced ; 

 fever and famine dogged its steps, ruin stalked before it. An instant, 

 and I was pressed trodden down crushed to a mummy beneath the 

 weight of this Wanderer of the wilderness ; my mouth my eyes my 

 veins every pore in my skin, pierced through and through with a mil- 

 lion subtle, searching, but invisible, atoms of dust. How long I lay 

 in this state I know not; a sound, as of the rush of mighty waters, 

 roused me from my torpor, and, looking up, I descried, first, the indis- 

 tinct heavings of a surge, then the long swell of billows, 'till gathering 

 power as it approached, the whole fury of the ocean broke in thunder on 

 the desert, sweeping me far away on its bosom, now tossed high up in 

 air, now plunged into an abyss, sweating and shrieking with agony, amid 

 the roar of the winds, the answering tumult of the waves, and the shouts 

 of a thousand unknown monsters. 



The scene was changed, and I stood at midnight in a church-yard, 

 populous with graves and the pestilential luxuriance of henbane. The 

 moon was at the end of her first quarter, and ever, as the clouds passed 

 over her, a lean wolf, from the neighbouring abbey, would give out a 

 long howl, the graves would stir with life, and a laughing fiendish face 

 would glare out from between the chinks of the black cloistered arches, 

 where the toad spit forth her venom. As I stood spell-bound beneath 

 the steady gaze of those demon-lighted eyes, the clock tolled mid- 

 night ; a crash, such as if a multitude of coffins were burst, at one blow, 

 asunder, ensued ; and presently a spectre started up from every grave, 

 and pointed in mockery towards me. But my hour was not yet come. 

 While I yet reeled, like a drunkard, beneath the intensity of my fear, a 

 solemn strain of music, low at first, but deepening and swelling by 

 degrees, until it filled the hollow arch of space, broke from the forlorn 

 abbey, and, at the sound, the spectral forms vanished, leaving me alone 

 entranced beneath the moon. 



A third change ensued. The scene was Bishopsteignton. It was a 

 fine mellow July morning : the air was brisk and elastic, the hedges 

 were alive with music, and the lightly-frozen dewdrops hung half-melted 

 on the thistle's beard. Before me, at no great distance, lay the translucent 

 ocean, darkened here and there by the slight shadow of a passing sail ; 

 beneath me, the sweet, rural town of Teignmouth put forth its glad beauty 

 in the sunshine ; beside me, the newly-mown meadows- whose feet the 

 crystal waters of the Teign kept ever fresh and fragrant sent up a wel- 

 come aroma from their spread haycocks, on which a group of boys and 

 girls were idly lolling ; and behind me, exulting in the sweet conscious- 

 ness of its attractions, rose on the summit of its little hill the richly- 

 wooded village of Bishopsteignton, with the smoke from its peaceful 

 hamlets ascending like an incense to heaven, now half-lost amid the 

 overshadowing elms, now scattered by the playful summer wind, and 



