48 A Night on Dartmoor. [JAN. 



My situation now began to be alarming. I knew that I was sur- 

 rounded by morasses, between which it was impossible to pick my way 

 at night-fall, and that one false step would plunge me headlong into the 

 midst of them. In this condition, after a moment's hesitation, I resolved 

 to go back a few paces towards a fragment of rock against which I had 

 just stumbled, and there await the rising of the moon, which, I doubted 

 not, would soon afford light sufficient to enable me to continue my jour- 

 ney. It was not without difficulty that I found even this imperfect 

 shelter, and when at length I had seated myself beneath the crag, what 

 with the chill drops that trickled down its side, and the heavy clinging 

 mist that wrapt me round like a mantle, my situation was little, if at all, 

 amended. 



To sustain my cheerfulness I had recourse to the exercise of my fancy. 

 I endeavoured to look at my situation in the light of an uncommonly 

 good joke, which would tell well among my friends in town, and prove, 

 that a traveller may be quite as picturesquely located in an English, as 

 in an African desert. I then took a higher flight. I recalled the ancient 

 glories of Dartmoor, when the voice of the warrior Druid, as he stood 

 beside some gigantic Tor that cathedral, fashioned by Nature's own 

 hands, in which alone the Seer would condescend to offer up his bloody 

 sacrifices was heard pealing through the depths of the wilderness, 

 summoning the brave to battle, and breathing courage into the heart of 

 the coward ; when the moor itself was peopled with aboriginals, and its 

 old oaks, from beneath whose branching arms the elk stole timidly forth, 

 rung to the hunters' shout of triumph, the stag-hounds' deep-mouthed 

 answer, and the last faint yell of the free-born red deer. 



But imagination ill accords with an empty stomach. You may blunt 

 grief by reflection, and passion by philosophy, but I am yet to discover 

 what mental specific can take the edge off a craving appetite. The 

 gastric juice is not to be reasoned into submission ; it is a stubborn 

 Catholic that knows its rights and will maintain them. 



I felt this truth most acutely, and had spent upwards of an hour in 

 the vain endeavour to disprove it, when my attention was diverted by the 

 sound of the distant evening chimes from South Zeal. There is some- 

 thing peculiarly affecting in the tone of village bells. They are the 

 vocal newspapers of the parish, a species of melodious obituary, fraught 

 with a high moral interest from their close connection with life and 

 death. At any other period I should have listened to them with tran- 

 sport, but at this particular juncture their music was peculiarly pro- 

 voking. It reminded me that I was but three miles from South Zeal, 

 yet that, nevertheless, an impassable gulph lay between us. It was a 

 cuckoo song of mockery : a refinement in torture worthy of Procrustes 

 himself. 



I have observed, that it was dark when I reached the rock, but this 

 does not adequately express the character of the gloom that momently 

 deepened on the moor. It was not mere darkness, but a frightful, ebon, 

 determined, unwholesome blackness, worthy to vie with the raven's wing, 

 or the velvet pall of death. Above, around, beneath all was one uni- 

 form hue, spread over the earth like a shroud. Then, too, the silence 

 the strange, solemn, unnatural silence, of the desert, which seemed to 

 have borrowed its intensity from the grave ; words cannot describe the 

 deadening weight with which it gradually sunk into my heart ! But 

 half an hour before, I had listened to the village chimes with impatience, 



