scarcely dry. The new veneer peeled off the
new chiffonnier. The roller blinds to the
windows were so new that they wouldn't
work. The new stair-carpeting used to dazzle
my eyes so, that I was always tripping
myself up; the new oil-cloth in the hall smelt
like the Trinity House repository for new
buoys, and Mrs. Primpris was always full
dressed, cameo brooch and all, by nine o'clock
in the morning. She confessed, once or
twice during my stay, that her house was
not quite "seasoned." It was not even
seasoned to sound. Every time the kitchen
fire was poked you heard the sound in
the sitting-room. As to perfumes, whenever
the lid of the copper in the wash-house
was raised, the first-floor lodger was
aware of the fact. I knew, by the simple
evidence of my olfactory organs, what Mrs.
Primpris had for dinner, every day. Pork,
accompanied by some green esculent, boiled,
predominated.

When my fortnight's tenancy had expired
—I never went outside the house until I
left it for good—and my epic poem, or what
ever it was, had more or less been
completed, I returned to London, and had a
fine bilious attack. The doctor said it was
painter's colic; I said at the time that it
was disappointed ambition, for the
booksellers had looked very coldly on my poetical
proposals, and the managers, to a man, had
refused to read my play; but, at this
present writing, I believe the sole cause of my
malady to have been Wretchedville. I hope
they will pull down the villas and build the
jail there soon, and that the rascal-convicts
will be as wretched as I was.

           AS THE CROW FLIES.

  DUE WEST. ACROSS DARTMOOR.

WILD country westward, where the Teign,
struggles on through a rocky valley, shut in by
towering hills, on which the clouds rest. The
crow hovers over the old camps of Prestonbury
and Cranbrook Castles, hard by Fingle
Bridge, because Mr. Merivale thinks, that here
the Britons wrestled with the rapacious Romans
for every inch of land, before they retreated
back towards the Tamar; and it was
hereabouts, perhaps, that Titus saved his father,
Vespasian, from the British axes in that rough
western campaign, when passes like this into
the broken country of Dartmoor were objects
of such fierce contention, between the legionary
and his half-savage foe.

No doubt this savage scenery impressed itself
on the minds of our old chieftains, who
encamped in its fastnesses, for the local legends
are numerous as the seeds at the back of a fern
leaf. Just by Ghilston Farm stands that
strange Druidical work—the Spinsters' Rock,
a table stone supported on three rude pillars.
On this sepulchre of we know not what forgotten
warrior, the crow alights, and inquiringly pecks
at the green pads of moss, and the blots of grey
lichen, as if they concealed some ancient epitaph.
This cromlech fell in 1862, and was replaced
with great labour. The local tradition is that
three spinsters (giantesses of course) erected
this trophy as a mere breather, one morning
before breakfast. Old writers, however, say
that three young men and their father brought
the stones from the highest tors of Dartmoor.
Wild antiquaries, on the maddest of hobby
horses, instantly leaping at this, declare that
the old man means Noah, and the three sons
typify Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The Druids
are supposed to have had traditions of the
Deluge and the Ark, it is true, but this legend,
there is no doubt, is only one of those fantastic
stories which are invented to account for the
achievements of the early races. Ecclesiological
antiquaries, who go mad about the Ark, and
see it in every logan poised on a hill-top, are
scarcely less mad than the Norse antiquarians,
who discern in every block of Devonshire granite
an altar to Thor or Odin. So these amiable
Celtic enthusiasts resolve to see in the harmless
Spinsters' Rock, types of the three sisters, the
choosers of the slain, the Fates of the Scandinavian
mythology, those dark sisters, who rode
over battle plains to call doomed warriors to
Odin.

Accustomed to the permanence of things, we
forget that the day will come when the last
ruin will fall, and the last picture of the old
masters perish. The great porcelain tower of
Nankin has gone to the ground, and only the
other day Titian's chef-d'Å“uvre, Peter the
Martyr, perished by fire. It startles one to
hear now and then of a rocking stone, or a
cathedral spire, falling—more leaves blown
from the old tree. Close by the Spinsters'
Rock, apropos of this reflection, there is a
logan stone lying in the channel of the stream,
embedded firmly in the sand. Polwhele
mentions it, in 1797, as fixed on the hill above,
where he moved it with one hand.

More wild hills, golden with furze, down
which Roman and Briton once rolled in the
death-lock, stabbing, hewing, cursing, shouting
to their gods, and staining the granite blocks
with blood. The crow alights with his sidelong
drift, as light as a snowflake, on the White Stone,
where the local legend is that King Arthur and
the enemy of mankind flung quoits at each
other, which quoits are now transformed into
shapeless blocks of granite, and remain to
confirm the legend.

Moreton Hampstead, close by the White
Stone, boasts an old cross and an old elm-tree at
the entrance of the churchyard. The local
tradition is, that this tree was formerly the
very centre of the old village festivities. Here
the forefathers of the hamlet met, and on the
long horizontal boughs of this tree a stage used
to be erected for dancing, the fiddler working
his elbow merrily on a branch above.

A flight forward, and the crow, passing