Hawk House lay under a tor, and behind it the land towered to a stony waste that culminated in wild masses of piled granite, where the rowan grew and the vixen laid her cubs. From this spot one might take a bird's-eye survey of Humphrey Baskerville's domain. Gold lichens had fastened on the roof, and the folk conceited that since there was no more room in the old man's house for his money, it began to ooze out through the tiles. Humphrey himself now sat on a favourite stone aloft and surveyed his possessions and the scene around them. It was his custom in fair weather to spend many hours sequestered upon the tor. Dwarf oaks grew in the clitters, and he marked the passage of the time by their activity, by the coming of migrant birds, by the appearance of the infant foxes and by other natural signs and tokens. Beneath Hawk House there subtended a great furze-clad space flanked with woods. The Rut, as it was called, fell away to farms and fertile fields, and terminated in a glen through which the little Torry river passed upon her way to Plym. Cann Wood fringed the neighbouring heights, and far away to the south Laira's lake extended and Plymouth appeared--faint, grey, glittering under a gauze of smoke. The tor itself was loved by hawks and stoats, crows and foxes. Not a few people, familiar with the fact that Humphrey here took his solitary walks and kept long vigils, would affirm that he held a sort of converse with these predatory things and learned from them their winged and four-footed cunning. His sympathy, indeed, was with fox and hawk rather than with hunter and hound. He admitted it, but in no sense of companionship with craft did he interest himself in the wild creatures. He made no fatuous imputation of cruelty to the hawk, or cunning to the fox. His bent of mind, none the less, inclined him to admire their singlehanded fight for life against long odds; and thus he, too, fell into fallacy; but his opinion took a practical turn and was not swiftly shattered, as such emotions are apt to be, when the pitied outlaw offers to the sentimental spectator a personal taste of his quality. If a hawk stooped above his chickens, he felt a sort of contempt for the screaming, flying fowls--let the hawk help itself if it could--and did not run for his gun. Indeed, he had no gun. As men said of this or that obstinate ancient that he had never travelled in a train, so they affirmed, concerning Humphrey Baskerville, that he had never in his life fired a gun. He sat and smoked a wooden pipe and reflected on the puzzles of his days. He knew that he was held in little esteem, but that had never troubled him. His inquiring spirit rose above his fellow-creatures; and he prided himself upon the fact, and did not see that just in this particular of a flight too lofty did he fail of the landmarks and sure ground he sought.