He writes on 13 February 1852, “Tho’ no snow in Plymouth, the wagons supplying provisions for Dartmoor could not go far upon their way, so it must be deep on the moor. Well, the convicts must go on short allowance. I do not know a better punishment for them.” Convicts were not sent to Dartmoor until 1850, and the natives did not welcome them. In a letter of 17 July 1839 he describes a thunderstorm that caught him and a friend of his between this house and Kelly Cross. It shattered a great oak tree by the roadside just after they had passed. “The clouds appeared almost down upon us, and we were quite encircled in lightning: our umbrella was always full of it.” He writes about another storm, 26 June 1844, “It hung over us for near two hours: I think, the loudest thunder I ever heard. The rush of fire into water was so very distinct, and then followed the rapping and rolling--precisely as when a blacksmith inserts a large piece of iron into his trough full of water: the rush at first and then the rumbling which exactly resembles thunder. But I never before heard that rush: it was really very awfull.” He adds, “I remember Lustleigh tower being greatly damaged by lightning many years ago.” He writes on 21 November 1852, “When you were here in the spring, you saw a rainbow in a field. Well, over in the Barleyparkes I saw a rainbow, both ends there. It literally lay on the ground: only the arch was erect and made a bend from the straight lines [he draws a capital U upside down] but both ends lay on the ground, and the ground sloped from me. I came within a yard of the ends of it, the arch not ten yards from me; but it receded as I approached. I walked it out of the field, and drove it before me to the Meadow, where I left it with both ends in the brook.” Most people here lived patriarchally beneath their fig trees and their vines, and many of them found that ripe figs were like venison in tasting best with port. The older fig trees are usually on the sheltered sides of houses--the fig tree here is on the south side of the house, with its trunk close by the chimney and its roots in underneath the hearth--but of late years several have been planted on the sunny sides of some of the big rocks. The rock gives shelter, and also radiates the heat, so that the figs are ripened on both sides at once.