lure us as a kindly home, or repel us as a desert. Even the repulsion has its own manner of charm, because it braces us to self-assertion and manhood. It was from this Hey Tor side of the moorland that William Howitt once looked forth upon Dartmoor. He tells us: "My road wound up and up, the heather and the bilberry on either hand shewing me that cultivation had never disturbed the soil they grew in; and one sole woodlark from the far-ascending forest to the right filled the wild solitude with his autumnal note. At that moment I reached an eminence, and at once saw the dark crags of Dartmoor high aloft before me, and one large solitary house in the valley beneath the woods. So fair, so silent, save for the woodlark's note and the moaning river, so unearthly did the whole scene seem, that my imagination delighted to look upon it as an enchanted land, and to persuade itself that that house stood as it would stand for ages, under the spell of silence but beyond the reach of death and change." This was written three-quarters of a century since, before nature had begun greatly to inspire our prose writers; and for its period it is very creditable. In poetry we have made no progress; but in the prose literature of nature--that is to say, of natural scenes viewed under human emotion--it is an immense step from the writings of William Gilpin and Richard Warner, and even of Howitt, to those of George Borrow and Richard Jefferies. Even in prose it had been the poets, Gray and Wordsworth, who had shown the way, very slowly followed. Warner was an enterprising and intelligent traveller, and visited many parts of the south and west from his Bath home, long before the time of railways. It is interesting to notice how he was daunted by Dartmoor. Overnight he had decided to walk from Lydford to Two Bridges, though the idea of "travelling twelve miles over a desolate moor, wild as the African Syrtes, without a single human inhabitant or regular track, had something in it very deterring". Next morning it actually deterred. "As the trial approximated, my resolution, like Acres' courage, gradually oozed away, and before breakfast was finished I had dropped the idea, and determined to take a circuitous route by Oakhampton." His landlord had just told him how the body of a dead sailor had been discovered in a lonely spot, where it must have lain for weeks; and Warner's discretion proved greater than his valour. But we need not sneer at him. It is still easy to be lost on Dartmoor. Those who are fond of logan-stones may find some in this district: there is one at Lustleigh, a fine one on Rippon, and others elsewhere. Some of them no longer "log" satisfactorily, and certainly none are connected with Druidic or other ceremonial. They are natural formations, like the rock-basins and the tors themselves.