Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/295

Charles Dickens] and the distant ridge of which is crowned by the petrified wild beast that is known to the wild huntsman's hounds as Row Tor, that the crow peeringly, as if a murdered man lay there, hovers above the strangest place in all the moor—the Wistman's wood—that humble remnant of the great forest through whose green glades the wild deer leaped, and whose broad green boughs shed blossoms on the helmeted heads of the knights of Richard of the Lion Heart. The dwarfed oaks in this enchanted wood, that seem blighted by some curse, are festooned with ivy and matted with moss. They spread their matted heads above a thorny adder-haunted confusion of granite blocks, crushed close, and kept down by the tyrannous moor winds. These stunted trees, feathered with fern, and encumbered with choking parasites, have been struggling for a livelihood in this forlorn place ever since the Conqueror sprang from his boat upon the Hastings shore. Old records prove that beyond dispute. When the Briton wore his collar of gold and wielded his bronze axe for a sceptre, they were here; when the Briton was a mere hunted fugitive, cowering in the brake when the Roman trumpets sounded over the tors, these trees were still crowding together in abject submission to the rude elements. The Plantagenets passed, and the Tudors, and the Stuarts, and still the wood, under the curse, struggled on. The average height of the trees is only ten or twelve feet, but many reach only the stature of a man. The local saying is that, in Wistman's wood, there are five hundred oaks five hundred feet high, meaning that each tree averages one foot in height. The antiquarian theorists have, of course, been hard at this wood, whittling out paradoxes. A insists that this was one of those "groves in stony places" mentioned in Scripture as dedicated to Baal and Ashtoreth. In such a rocky valley the priests of Baal may have shouted to their god and cut themselves with flints, as when Elisha mocked the tardiness of their deity. B is equally sure that this was a grove of Woden, who still hunts with his spectral hounds over the quaking morass where even the fox can scarcely pass. The Phœnician tin streamers, and the fugitive Britons who hid here, brought these wild traditions to the moor, and there they still linger in cramped growth, like the crabbed knotted trees of the Wistman's wood. By the old Cyclopean bridges that the Britons piled across the Dart in these places, by the overthrown cromlechs, and logans long fallen from their mystic balance, the legends of Odin and his hell hounds still linger, fitting the place as well as the wallflower does the ruin, or the mushroom ring the meadow. Here alone, like the last of an otherwise extinct race, the traditions of an old mythology remain, and will remain perhaps for ever. They befit the blighted forest, the No Man's Land, the howling waste, the eternal wilderness, the primeval barrens of Dartmoor, and should be studied on the spot where the heather is most purple, the moss greenest and softest, among spectral tors filmed with shadows, where the streams are blue as the sky when the rocks are grey in the sunshine, or, better still, by the swamp where the snipe calls and the bittern booms, when the streams, swollen by rain, come sounding down the rocky valleys.

It is a singular thing how some places seem set apart by nature for scenes of suffering, flight, tribulation, and sorrow; and to the wounded and the unhappy, the defeated and the oppressed, these rocks were always ramparts. The Briton fled here from the Roman, the Briton fled here from the Saxon, and the Saxon fled here from the Norman. Even later, in the French war, ten thousand French prisoners were kept in the great walled pound at Princes Town, shut in by double walls, a military road, endless sentinels, and an enceinte of ceaseless mist and rain. The sentries then had large bells, which they rang at intervals during great fogs, to warn each other, to alarm the Napoleonists, and to guide belated travellers. When peace came, the prison, for a long time a mere landmark, was turned into a naphtha manufactory. In 1850, it again became a prison, and now, once more, the escaped convict occasionally skulks behind the Dartmoor tors, and seeks shelter with the fox and the snake, fitting companions, where the hounded Briton, his noble forefather, once fled the Roman spears. There in the morass, with the plover screaming over head, the Artful Dodger may still stave out a day or two, safe from the weary crank, and the cruel toil of the granite quarry.

A flap of the crow's wing drives the inquisitive bird through the blue Devonshire air from the lonely convict prison to Fitz's Well, whose votive granite slabs still bear the initials of John Fitz, of Fitzford, near Tavistock, and the date 1568. They are a record of Devonshire superstition, being placed over a spring by a knight and his lady, in Elizabeth's reign; one day, pixy led, they lost their way on the moor, and when worn out and hopeless, came suddenly, to their joy, upon these refreshing waters.

These pixies, who live in the clefts of the granite rocks, occupy an important place in Devonshire mythology. The peasantry drop pins or other offerings when they pass their haunts, and children, dreading lest elfin mothers should adopt them, do not venture near pixy haunted places after sunset. The pixies hide their gold among the tors. They are heard on dark nights galloping by on horses they have borrowed from the farmers, or are heard pounding their cyder in Sheeps Tor caverns.

Far above the hut circles and stone avenues of Black Tor, the crow passes silently till he comes to Fox Tor, and there he alights with a full swoop upon a legend of Edward the Third's reign. The story goes that at this time, when Cressy was talked of as Inkerman is now, John Childe, of Plymstoke, a knight of fortune, who was devotedly fond of hunting, was here benighted. Mists rose, pixies lured him on with false lights, snow set in in blinding flakes, there was no help and no shelter, so John Childe, hard driven, stabbed his horse, cut the poor beast open, and crept into its bowels for shelter. But all in vain. That night he perished. The monks of Tavistock, hearing of the mysterious