And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their green copses, ridges of rock, golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red longhorns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads; and under us, seen in bird’s-eye view, the ground-plans of the little snug farms and homesteads of the Damnonii, ‘dwellers in the valley,’ as we West-countrymen were called of old. Now we are leaving them far below us; the blue hazy sea is showing far above the serrated ridge of the Tors, and their huge bank of sunny green: and before us is a desolate table-land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks, festooned with the delicate network of the little ivy-leaved campanula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its hair-like stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania. Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the region of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators here, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the rook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough—the fat deep crumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened ages since. There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England, under ‘a four-course shift,’ yielding their load of wheat an acre. When will that land do as much? When will the spirit of Smith of Deanston and Grey of Dilston descend on North Devon? When will some true captain of industry, and Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr. Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago to ‘the new gospel of fertility.’ When will North Devon awake? ‘When landlords and farmers,’ said Claude, ‘at last acknowledge their divine vocation, and feel it a noble and heaven-ordained duty to produce food for the people of England; when they learn that to grow rushes where they might grow corn, ay, to grow four quarters of wheat where they might grow five, is to sin against God’s blessings and against the English nation. No wonder that sluggards like these cry out for protection—that those who cannot take care of the land feel that they themselves need artificial care.’ ‘We will not talk politics, Claude. Our modern expediency mongers have made them _pro tempore_ an extinct science. “Let the dead bury their dead.” The social questions are now-a-days becoming far more important than the mere House of Commons ones.’ ‘There does seem here and there,’ he said, ‘some sign of improvement. I see the paring plough at work on one field and another.’