kistvaen, may we speak with greater certainty and, through the glimmering dawn of history and the records of Britain's earliest foes, burrow back to aboriginal man on Dartmoor. Then research and imagination rebuild the eternal rings of granite and, erecting upon them tall domes of thatch and skins on wattle ribs, conceive the early village like a cluster of gigantic mushrooms, whose cowls are uplifted in that rugged fastness through the night of time. We see Palaeolithic man sink into mother earth before the superior genius of his Neolithic successor; and we note the Damnonian shepherds flourishing in lonely lodges and preserving their flocks from the wolf, while Egypt's pyramids were still of modern creation, and the stars twinkled in strange constellations, above a world innocent as yet of the legends that would name them. The stone-workers have vanished away, but their labour endures; their fabricated flints still appear, brought to light from barrows and peat-ties, from the burrows of rabbits and the mounds of the antiquary mole; the ruins of their habitations, the theatres of their assemblies and unknown ceremonies still stand, and probably will continue so to do as long as Dartmoor's bosom lies bare to the storm and stress of the ages. Modern man has also fretted the wide expanse, has scratched its surface and dropped a little sweat and blood; but his mansion and his cot and his grave are no more; plutonic rock is the only tablet on which any human story has been scribbled to endure. Castles and manor-houses have vanished from the moorland confines like the cloudy palaces of a dream; the habitations of the mining folk shall not be seen to-day, and their handiwork quickly returns to primitive waste; fern and furze hide the robbed cairn and bury the shattered cross; flood and lightning and tempest roam over the darkness of a region sacred to them, and man stretches his hand for what Nature touches not; but the menhir yet stands erect, the "sacred" circles are circles still, and these, with like records of a dim past, present to thinking travellers the crown and first glory of the Moor. Integral portions of the ambient desolation are they--rude toys that infant humanity has left in Mother Nature's lap; and the spectacle of them twines a golden thread of human interest into the fabric of each lonely heath, each storm-scarred mountain-top and heron-haunted stream. Nothing is changed since skin-clad soldiers and shepherds strode these wastes, felt their hearts quicken at sight of women, or their hands clench over celt-headed spears before danger. Here the babies of the stone-folk, as the boys and girls to-day, stained their little mouths and ringers with fruit of briar and whortle; the ling bloomed then as now; the cotton-grass danced its tattered plume; the sphagnum mosses opened emerald-green eyes in marsh and quaking bog; and hoary granite scattered every ravine and desert valley. About those