The next time I was here, I was talking to Mrs *****--she was of an earlier generation than the Mrs ***** of whom I spoke just now--and I told her that I had been to Rome and seen the Pope. She asked me eagerly, “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper tiger to fight.” As a thoroughgoing Protestant, she knew no difference between the Devil and the Pope. Her husband always felt that a great chance had been missed, when the Devil came into Widdicombe church on Sunday 21 October 1638. My grandfather pressed him as to what he would have done; and his reply was, “Dock’n, maister, dock’n--cut the tail of’n off.” I imagine that the Devil’s tail at Widdicombe would have drawn more pilgrims than all the relics of the saints at other places. I have been told that an ancestor of mine, then living at Torr in the parish of Widdicombe, was one of the people present in the church, when the Devil came in; but I have no documentary proof. In the old rhymed narrative, inscribed upon a tablet in the church, there is no mention of the Devil, but only a broad hint:--“a crack of thunder suddenly, with lightning, hail and fire ... a sulphureous smell ... or _other force, whate’er it was_, which at that time befell.” Once, for about five minutes, I had the strongest possible belief in the personality of the Devil, or rather of his ancestor Great Pan, for I felt the Panic Terror. I was coming down along the side of Yarner Wood in bracken nearly as high as my head. It was beginning to get dark, and I was just thinking I should be very late for dinner; when suddenly I remembered the story of the Devil taking refuge in that wood, and I felt dead certain he was there. I stepped out very briskly till I reached the road. Strange apparitions may be seen on Dartmoor on a misty day: especially if you have lost your bearings, and come unexpectedly on one of the great groups of rocks with this vapour drifting in and out between them. It is like “seeing faces in the fire,” but on a scale that seems stupendous in the mist. There is said to be a goblin about a quarter of a mile from here. He sits on Bishop’s Stone--so called because it bears the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369 A.D. I have never seen the goblin; but I have good evidence that men have been scared by something there at night, and that horses have refused to pass there in the day. I fancy they hear the murmur of water running underground.