The subject of Devonshire rivers is a matter of _embarras de richesses_ indeed. To the writer, who has trodden the banks of most of them at one time or another from earliest youth, and spent long periods on intimate terms with many, some preferences due to such associations are well-nigh unsurmountable. But no impartial soul who knows the county well will, I think, dispute the claim of the Dart to be absolutely the Queen of Devonshire rivers. In the wild Dartmoor wanderings of its two branches to their junction at Dartmeet it has all the qualities and atmosphere which we look for, and many of us greatly love, of a typical moorland peaty stream. When it escapes through the high gateway of the moor, through that fringing country between the absolutely wild and the wholly domestic in which transitional condition Devon is always at its best, the Dart has perhaps no equal in the county. From some distance above the deservedly famous Chase of Holne till it approaches the little town of Buckfastleigh the exceptional altitude and abruptness of the hills through which it breaks its impetuous way, the lavish display of verdure--mostly, as in other Devonshire valleys, of oak--which clothes the steeps, the rugged character of the rocky ledges where the streams are now lashed to white-capped fury, or now pent into narrow rushing flumes of deep black water, are nowhere excelled. Released from this beautiful tangle of woods and the rugged bed over which it has fought its way out from the solitudes of the moor, the Dart sobers down into a typical salmon river of the less riotous order. For when it shoots under the bridge at Buckfastleigh it has attained quite imposing dimensions in a wonderfully short space of time, and for the seven or eight miles that remain to it before meeting the tide at Totnes makes a fine display, in alternate moods of speed and quiet, of deep and shallow, in the green vale between the now much lowlier hills. Buckfastleigh is not a dream of wood and stone, but it does no great violence to the charm of its site, and has an old Benedictine Abbey, which has been recently restored and occupied by French [Illustration: THE DART, DITTISHAM, DEVON] [Illustration]