haunts of the raven and the fox, granite altars,
wooded hills, and noisy mill-streams, skims to
that strangest of all the Devonshire logans, the
Nutcracking Rock, on the rocky ridge by
Lustleigh Cleave, not far from Monaton. This
logan can be moved with a little finger, and
the country boys crack nuts at the points
where the keel of the logan strikes against its
supporter. It is at Monaton, close by, that it
is said there was once a monster of a snake
that haunted the valley—a monster with a
body as big as a man's, with real legs, broad
sail wings, and a hiss that could be heard for
miles. It is hard to account for the great
prevalence of snake legends in Devonshire.

The crow strikes forth now for the source
of the Dart, that river so sudden in its anger,
so wild and tumultuous. The legend is that the
river every year demands a victim.

     River of Dart, oh, river of Dart,
     Every year thou claimest a heart.

The doomed man, till the day comes, ploughs
calmly in the moorside villages, fishes in the
Teign valley, drives on the western roads, hurries
in the western trains, goes here, goes there,
still, sooner or later, he comes, at the destined
hour, to the river, swollen and clamorous for
its victim, and, struggle as he may, is at once
hurried to his death. Swift over the borders
of Dartmoor, where the hills are crowned with
granite ruins, and bogs and oak woods mingle
with ploughlands and little green carpets of
pasture, the bird alights on the grey tower of that
bleak, out-of-the-world place, Widdicomb-in-
the Moors, shut in by rocky hills, and surrounded
by the sites of British villages, old roadways,
and relics of strange Druid worship. This
tranquil place, sheltered by its primeval
sycamore trees, had a ghastly visit from King
Death in October, 1638. The villagers were
gathered in the church, the prayer was being
said, the hymn sung, when gradually the air
grew darker, and a storm began to gather.
Alarmed looks were exchanged, the children
drew closer to their mothers. Suddenly, after
some flashes of cross lightning, a ball of fire
burst through one of the windows, and broke,
like a red-hot shell, among the frightened and
scattering people. At the same moment the
roof and tower were struck, the stones of the
steeple fell in a shower, "as fast," says the
local historian, "as if they had been thrown
down by a hundred men," and a pinnacle of
the tower also crashed in. Four persons were
killed on the spot, and sixty-two were wounded,
some by the fire and others by the stones.
There could be no doubt of the author of this
calamity. Some mysterious guilt must have
rested upon the village, for an old woman who
kept a little public-house on a lonely edge of
the moor, remembered, that, just as church
went in, a tall lame man dressed in black,
riding a powerful black horse, inquired the
way to Widdicomb Church, and called for a
stoup of cyder. He wanted her to show him to
the church, being afraid of losing his way on the
moor, but the old woman was too cautious, for
she observed that the cyder he drank smoked
and hissed as it went down his throat, and, as
he stumbled upon his horse, a palpable cloven
hoof protruded from his boot. Half an hour
after, this gentleman in black cast the fireball
into Widdicomb Church.

The crow has now twenty miles of moor to
flap its wings over. A desolate tract of coarse
grass and reeds, whortleberry and moss; valleys
thick bushed with fern and furze; central
oozing masses of morass that swell and burst
with the rain, and are the source of half the
Devonshire rivers; bare wind-swept tors
crowned with rocks that are now like ruined
castles, now like giants and wild beasts; hills
consecrated in old times to the gods of the
Druids. Watchful over miles of heather, green
moss, red grass, and rushes, the crow bears on
in unimpeded flight, to that strange spot
Cranmere Pool, that little bright oasis among
the Dartmoor morasses, where the country
people believe that lost spirits, purgatorially
imprisoned, are to be heard at night when the
wind is loudest, wailing in the bitterness of
their despair.

The one hundred and thirty acres of
Dartmoor, supposed to have been once a forest,
were in King John's time an asylum for deer
and wild cattle. Henry the Third gave them to
Richard Duke of Cornwall, and in Edward the
Third's reign they became part of the Duchy.
No wonder that superstition still holds Dartmoor
as a stronghold. Still, on wild stormy nights,
when even the dwarf oaks of the Wistman's
wood crouch lower before the blast, Woden
the swart "master" is still heard urging his
wish hounds from tor to tor, chasing the goblins
from glen to glen. The brown man of the
moors still starts up, to scare the traveller as
he passes the workings of the old tin mines,
and, in curdling mist or drifting snow,
malicious pixies still mislead shivering travellers,
and beguile them to their death. Many a
horseman have the pixies led to "the Dartmoor
stables," as the most dangerous of the
morasses are sardonically called. By
moonlight, too, under the tors, the pixies still hold
their revels, and when ceasing to work man
mischief, dance, feast, and sing.

The crow rests in its flight at Crockern Tor,
because there the old Stannary court used to be
held, and as late as 1749 the tinners met there
in Parliament, and, seated on granite benches
under the open sky of that cold damp region,
discussed their preliminary ancient laws, and
their disputes, before adjourning to one of the
adjacent towns. There are records of an Earl
of Bath in old times attending the meetings
in this strange place, accompanied by several
hundred retainers, and with half the country at
his back. This was an old British custom
of extreme antiquity. The Isle of Man has
still its parliament hill, and it is well known
that the ancient Britons held their assizes and
great palavers, in the great stone circles and
turf amphitheatres.

But it is up the stream of the Dart, in that
ghostly valley bounded by Crockern Tor and
Little and Great Bairdown, the slopes of which
are strewn with countless tombstones of granite,