The moor always has an amazing effect upon me. I know that Eden Phillpotts and John Trevena talk a good deal about the malicious spirit of the great monoliths and the permanence of the stone, making even more futile by contrast the efforts of puny and transient man, but I find Dartmoor infinitely consoling. Here at Radchester I certainly do feel a malign influence in the ugliness of the flat lands and the hideous waste of sand and grey water, but there is a richness about the moor that makes Nature there seem much more the Eternal Mother and Generous Giver, sympathizer at any rate with strong and lusty youth. Grandeur and beauty in scenery surely can never do anything but elevate and purify the spirit of man. I am never happier than when I have scaled the top of one of these Tors and can turn north, south, east, and west and see no living soul. The wind sweeps through me, the sun shines for me alone, all the blue of the heavens is mine. I am nearer to the elemental things than at any other time in my life. I am no longer introspective, dwelling on human imperfections; I am just filled to the brim with thankfulness, and opening my arms wide I feel that I am about to be taken into the embraces of my Lord Himself: He is never so near as He is on these Mounts of Transfiguration: for all hills tend to transfigure not only God but man. As he rises farther from the valley in body, so does his soul expand. Young Illingworth and I found that we could talk of things on the moor that we should never have dreamt of discussing elsewhere. After a long and arduous climb, just to throw oneself down on the heather and gaze languidly, in sweet and utter content, up into the sky! How remote and unreal Radchester and all it stands for seemed at such moments, how small and ridiculously inept the quarrels and troubles that loom so large in Common Room; these hills certainly sweep away any malice that one may feel, or grudge that one may bear against one's fellow-men. Like St. Peter I never want to come down from these heights: I want to live in that rarefied atmosphere always, but the workaday world calls and we have to descend again into the fray. Betty and Thomasin, as an alternative to the noises on the piano, used to get us to go into the kitchen and read aloud to them till bedtime stories out of "The Arabian Nights." As an alternative to the moor there was always the Teign, in which river we used to paddle and bathe and shoot at fish with a horrible old revolver which Illingworth had been prevailed upon to buy from a poacher. Another of our sources of pleasure was an old disused mill, a survival of the eighteenth century. Illingworth found a chain by which we could be hauled up from floor to floor by a system of pulleys on the fifth floor: he never tired of this particular form of amusement, and on really wet days we used to spend hours pulling one another up and down like sacks of wheat.