So Ben was sent off with a flea in his ear, an’ the world laughed at him, an’ he changed his opinion about marriage an’ growed to be a hard an’ fast bachelor, an’ a very great lover of saving money. But as for Mary Jane, she did her husband a power of good an’ enlarged his mind every way. An’ when they got a family, young Yelland’s nature comed very well through the usual ups an’ downs of life. He fancied hisself less, an’ thought of his little people an’ his good lady first, an’ growed a bit more like his faither before him. Not, of course, that he was the man his faither was. But what chap ever be, for that matter? I never see none. CROSS WAYS CHAPTER I There is a desolation that no natural scene has power to invoke. The labour of Nature’s thousand forces upon earth’s face may awaken awe before their enduring record, but can conjure no sense of sorrow; for high mountains, huge waste places and rivers calling shall make us feel small enough, not sad; but cast into the vast theatre some stone that marks a man’s grave, some ruined aboriginal hut or roofless cottage, some hypæthral meeting-place or arena of deserted human activity, and emotions rise to accentuate the scene. Henceforth the desert is peopled with ghosts of men and women; and their hopes and ambitions, their triumphs, and griefs glimmer out of dream pictures and tune the beholder to a sentiment of mournfulness. Such a scene on a scale unusually spacious may be found in the central waste of Dartmoor, nigh Postbridge. Here, where marshes stretch, all ribbed with black peat cuttings, between the arms of Dart, where Higher White Tor rises northward and the jagged summits of lesser peaks slope southerly to Crockern, there lies a strange congeries of modern buildings rotting into dust and rust at the song of a stream. Even the lonely groves that shield these ruins are similarly passing to decay; but many trees still flourish there, and under the shadows of them, or upon the banks of the Cherry-brook that winds in the midst and babbles its way to the mother-river, stand scattered remains of a considerable factory. Now only a snipe drums or a plover mews plaintively, where some short years ago was great hum and stir of business and a colony of men engaged upon most dangerous toil. Rows of whitewashed buildings still peep from the dark grove or stud those undulating hillocks that tend moorward beyond it. Tall grey chimneys rise here and there, and between certain shattered buildings, linking the same together, great water-wheels appear. These from their deep abodes thrust forth shattered spokes and crooked limbs and claws. They slumber half in gloom, like fossil monsters partially revealed. From their dilapidated jaws there glitters the slime of unclean creatures; moss hides the masses of their putrefied bones; huge liverworts clothe their decay, and hart’s-tongue ferns loll from their cracks and clefts, and thrive in the eternal twilight beneath them.