386 DARTMOOR AND THE DART. 



foamy torrent : there is a short but pretty plunge over 

 the dividing ridge, with a deafening noise, that com- 

 bines the whisper with the roar. The views upward 

 and downward are both beautiful ; the latter espe- 

 cially, where the tall overspreading trees -patulce fagi 

 shadow the whitening current in a long receding 

 vista. 



I was struck with the resemblance borne by the 

 bank of the stream to the sea shore ; the shale crops 

 out, and this is worn by the rushing flood into smoothed, 

 but irregularly angular, projections and hollows, ex- 

 actly like tide-pools, while the sand lying here and 

 there, washed into ripples, increases the vraiseniblance. 

 Nor was the illusion altogether dispelled by the vege- 

 tation ; for the Osmunda regalis the royal flowering- 

 fern which grows all along the very water's edge, 

 presented a strange likeness to a sun-dried sea-weed, 

 for the clumps growing on the points of the shale, and 

 out of the sand, had formed great compact masses of 

 black wiry roots, from which in many cases almost 

 all the soil had been washed away, and which threw 

 up only a few stunted and deformed fronds, in no 

 adequate proportion to the size of the root-masses. 



A tiny brook comes down the left bank, and pours 

 its little cascade into the stream ; and just here we 

 find some fine tufts of the hard-fern,* growing out of 

 the sand. It is a fern which we do not know around 

 Torquay, but we became subsequently familiar enough 

 with its long pinnate fronds. The azure heads of the 



* Bleclmum spicant. 



