DART 



ERY near the heart of Devon's wild table- 

 land rise the sisters of Dart, one beneath 

 the great sponge of Cranmere, mother of 

 rivers, the other from those shaggy slopes 

 of heather-clad Cut Hill that crown the central lone- 

 liness. By winding ways the new-born rivers gleam 

 through wastes of the budding ling, making musical 

 the silence ; and here small mare and woolly foal 

 stand at the brink of them, and here bellowing kine, 

 with tails in air and uplifted muzzles, gallop cumbrously 

 and plunge dew-lap deep in some familiar pool that 

 shall shelter them from the summer o"lare and insect 

 life. To their meeting-place the rivers prattle along, 

 now leaden, now golden, now all olive and sepia in 

 some silent bend where they widen and grow still, 

 now foaming and fretting over mossy stairs of granite, 

 now wrinkled and full of tremulous light, where they 

 rise again after some headlong leap. To their con- 

 fluence, West Dart comes from journeying past Wist- 

 man's oaks, hard by old Crockern's historic crown ; 

 while her sister travels through glades and meadows 

 beneath the gfranite head of Believer. The one has 

 wandered beside little islets, where in Spring white 



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