48 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



aye; it's a bit saft perhaps; but it'll no jist harm the hay 

 much." 



Yet half this deluge would drive a Southron squire or parson 

 wild as he thought of his home-meadow. The virtue of resigna- 

 tion is strongly developed in Scottish peasants. Ere now we 

 have seen them carting away barley sheaves in early winter, 

 which had lain so long in the harvest fields, amongst the down- 

 pour of a wet autumn, that they had sprouted afresh and 

 developed into a mass of living mouldiness, with a calm cheer- 

 fulness that spoke volumes for the solace of Calvinistic teaching. 

 Much of it was useless for man, they told us, but it would do 

 nicely for " the fools and the pigs." After all, fatalism, tem- 

 pered with religion, is not an unsuitable philosophy for people 

 who live in dreary, desolate heather-wastes, overhung with 

 murky skies, and ever liable to be drenched with persistent rain. 

 The sunny epicureanism of the Bay of Naples would be greatly 

 out of place at Strath Brora. 



Turn we again the heathery kaleidoscope to Dartmoor in 

 summer. A sense of breezy vastness is borne in upon the 

 soul, as on the slope of some granite-crowned tor, sinking into 

 the heather which so naturally invites to rest, the eye scans the 

 leagues of the ruddy plain, melting into blue hills and still bluer 

 sky. From Hamilton Down, say, we are looking over "spacious 

 Dertmoor," as Drayton calls it, over her swells and granite 

 "clatters" to the beautifully proportioned tower of Widdi- 

 combe, so well known in the records of Demonology. Further 

 north lies Manaton, Becky's Falls, and Lustleigh ground dear 

 to tourists. Far beyond these in the airy blue, the eye discerns 

 Bovey Tracey, with its curious lignite formation, and a faint 

 streak of white steam tells of the girdle which civilization is 

 gradually drawing round this " ancient moor." There are not 

 many localities in England, possessing features of their own, 

 where so extensive a view, such perfect solitude, can be ob- 

 tained. Three lovers of Dartmoor, well known in the West of 



