It would now have been easy to visit Bude Haven, and so to travel south and south-west along the cliffs which fringe the Atlantic, but our present plan was to strike inland to Dartmoor. The little town of Oke-hampton was therefore our first destination, reached by a somewhat dull route,--whichever road may be taken,--but, when gained, most interesting. The town lies in a valley, watered by a swift romantic river which, at one point, sweeping round a wooded hill, crowned by the ruins of an old castle, forms as lovely a picture as anything of the kind in England. Kingsley abuses Okehampton, unjustly, we think: but, whatever may be thought of the town and its immediate neighbourhood, there can be no doubt as to the wonderful interest of the excursions that may be taken from it as a centre. From the castle hill, as from other points in the town, the chief object that arrests the eye is the vast brown sweep of rising ground, suggestive of mysterious desolation beyond, which we know to be the boundary of Dartmoor. Ascending, we find ourselves at first on pleasant, breezy, though treeless heights, but keep to beaten paths, and pursue our onward journey. At length the moorland track over which we have passed seems to rise behind us and shut out the world; and as we gaze around, we feel that all pictures which we had framed to ourselves of wild deserted solitudes are surpassed. "Like the fragments of an earlier world," is the comparison that naturally rises to the lips. We are not unfamiliar with moorland scenery--with Rombald's Moor, for instance, in Yorkshire, beautiful in its variety of colour, from the tender green and softening greys and browns of spring, to the purple heathery splendours of the autumn, while the song of lark and linnet overhead, or the plaintive cry of the lapwing, gives animation to the scene. But at Dartmoor is a new experience of desolation. The stupendous mass of granite which here crops up from hidden depths is covered on its broken surface with thick peat, in whose depths the blackened trunks of trees occasionally give evidence of a time when the range was clothed with wood, but which, for the most part, bears only coarse grass and moss, with heather and whortleberry in the most favoured localities. Broad spaces are covered by morass and bog, dangerous to the unaccustomed pedestrian. Scanty streams break from the heights, and hurry in all directions down to the valley, swollen to wild fury after a storm. The "tor," or shapeless masses of rock, which stand out from the peaty surface in all directions, are but, as it were, the jagged projections from the interior rock-skeleton. Some may be readily ascended; Yes Tor (probably East Tor, pronounced Devonshire fashion) being the highest, and on many accounts the best worth climbing. [Illustration: 0141]