The red deer is the most beautiful of all wild creatures in England; seen in his native setting on these high, windy moors, the brown grass and patches of purple heather all round him, the clear brown and white streams of the combes where he waters, the blue shadows of hill behind hill, and the grey billows of mist and cloud the wind sends rolling down the hillsides, he is a noble beast indeed. Wild-horses also run on Exmoor. Mr. Page, in his "Exploration of Exmoor," advances the theory that they are not native ponies, like those of the New Forest or parts of Scotland, but the descendants of horses which the Phoenicians brought in their galleys when they traded with Cornwall and Devon; for their bones are smaller and lighter than those of our native ponies, and beautifully white and polished like ivory, as are the bones of the Arab horses of the north coast of Africa. This is an entertaining theory, with its romantic conjectures: the picture of the Phoenician oared galleys pulling into Combe Martin or Porlock Bay; the scenes on the beach, with the swarthy, beak-nosed sailors, the Celts, eager for trade and curious to look at any foreigners come from beyond the sea; the heaps of tin and silver, the ivory and gold and Eastern gauds with which the Phoenicians bartered; the plunging, high-spirited little horses, wild with release from the galleys. But though the Phoenicians certainly came, it is very likely the horses did not; for Mr. Snell, another authority on Exmoor, thinks that the ponies are indigenous, like the red deer, and are at least as old as the first human inhabitants of this north-west corner. They are small creatures, as active as cats, and at Bampton Fair, where many hundreds are driven in for the last Thursday in October, and the narrow streets are packed with them from end to end, there are scenes of great liveliness and disorder. Dulverton, which is the centre of Exmoor, used also to have a fair, which consisted mainly of Exmoor ponies and sheep; but it has passed out of existence by reason of railways and shops, and the greater facility for commercial exchange of our era, and the charming cobbled, whitewashed town--which was quite an important town, remember, when John Ridd's cousin Rachael lived there--now dozes undisturbed among the brown hills.