Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/293

Charles Dickens] scarcely dry. The new veneer peeled off the new chiffonnier. The roller blinds to the windows were so new that they wouldn't work. The new stair-carpeting used to dazzle my eyes so, that I was always tripping myself up; the new oil-cloth in the hall smelt like the Trinity House repository for new buoys, and Mrs. Primpris was always full dressed, cameo brooch and all, by nine o'clock in the morning. She confessed, once or twice during my stay, that her house was not quite "seasoned." It was not even seasoned to sound. Every time the kitchen fire was poked you heard the sound in the sitting-room. As to perfumes, whenever the lid of the copper in the washhouse was raised, the first-floor lodger was aware of the fact. I knew, by the simple evidence of my olfactory organs, what Mrs. Primpris had for dinner, every day. Pork, accompanied by some green esculent, boiled, predominated.

When my fortnight's tenancy had expired—I never went outside the house until I left it for good—and my epic poem, or what ever it was, had more or less been completed, I returned to London, and had a fine bilious attack. The doctor said it was painter's colic; I said at the time that it was disappointed ambition, for the booksellers had looked very coldly on my poetical proposals, and the managers, to a man, had refused to read my play; but, at this present writing, I believe the sole cause of my malady to have been Wretchedville. I hope they will pull down the villas and build the jail there soon, and that the rascal-convicts will be as wretched as I was.

country westward, where the Teign, struggles on through a rocky valley, shut in by towering hills, ou which the clouds rest. The crow hovers over the old camps of Prestonbury and Cranbrook Castles, hard by Fingle Bridge, because Mr. Merivale thinks, that here the Britons wrestled with the rapacious Romans for every inch of land, before they retreated back towards the Tamar; and it was hereabouts, perhaps, that Titus saved his father, Vespasian, from the British axes in that rough western campaign, when passes like this into the broken country of Dartmoor were objects of such fierce contention, between the legionary and his half-savage foe.

No doubt this savage scenery impressed itself on the minds of our old chieftains, who encamped in its fastnesses, for the local legends are numerous as the seeds at the back of a fern leaf. Just by Ghilston Farm stands that strange Druidical work—the Spinsters' Rock a table stone supported on three rude pillars. On this sepulchre of we know not what forgotten warrior, the crow alights, and inquiringly pecks at the green pads of moss, and the blots of grey lichen, as if they concealed some ancient epitaph. This cromlech fell in 1862, and was replaced with great labour. The local tradition is that three spinsters (giantesses of course) erected this trophy as a mere breather, one morning before breakfast. Old writers, however, say that three young men and their father brought the stones from the highest tors of Dartmoor. Wild antiquaries, on the maddest of hobby horses, instantly leaping at this, declare that the old man means Noah, and the three sons typify Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The Druids are supposed to have had traditions of the Deluge and the Ark, it is true, but this legend, there is no doubt, is only one of those fantastic stories which are invented to account for the achievements of the early races. Ecclesiological antiquaries, who go mad about the Ark, and see it in every logan poised on a hill-top, are scarcely less mad than the Norse antiquarians, who discern in every block of Devonshire granite an altar to Thor or Odin. So these amiable Celtic enthusiasts resolve to see in the harmless Spinsters' Rock, types of the three sisters, the choosers of the slain, the Fates of the Scandinavian mythology, those dark sisters, who rode over battle plains to call doomed warriors to Odin.

Accustomed to the permanence of things, we forget that the day will come when the last ruin will fall, and the last picture of the old masters perish. The great porcelain tower of Nankin has gone to the ground, and only the other day Titian's chef-d'œuvre, Peter the Martyr, perished by fire. It startles one to hear now and then of a rocking stone, or a cathedral spire, falling—more leaves blown from the old tree. Close by the Spinsters' Rock, apropos of this reflection, there is a logan stone lying in the channel of the stream, embedded firmly in the sand. Polwhele mentions it, in 1797, as fixed on the hill above, where he moved it with one hand.

More wild hills, golden with furze, down which Roman and Briton once rolled in the death-lock, stabbing, hewing, cursing, shouting to their gods, and staining the granite blocks with blood. The crow alights with his sidelong drift, as light as a snowflake, on the White Stone, where the local legend is that King Arthur and the enemy of mankind flung quoits at each other, which quoits are now transformed into shapeless blocks of granite, and remain to confirm the legend.

Moreton Hampstead, close by the White Stone, boasts an old cross and an old elm-tree at the entrance of the churchyard. The local tradition is, that this tree was formerly the very centre of the old village festivities. Here the forefathers of the hamlet met, and on the long horizontal boughs of this tree a stage used to be erected for dancing, the fiddler working his elbow merrily on a branch above.

A flight forward, and the crow, passing