n's be the same as yours to a split hair,
though I've got no language for em at this unnatural hour of marnin',"
said Billy.

Then in silence, to the bobbing illumination of their lanterns, Mr.
Lyddon and his familiar dragged their weary bodies home.

CHAPTER XI

LOVE AND GREY GRANITE

The lofty central area of Devon has ever presented a subject of
fascination to geologists; and those evidences of early man which adorn
Dartmoor to-day have similarly attracted antiquarian minds for many
generations past. But the first-named student, although his researches
plunge him into periods of mundane time inconceivably more remote than
that with which the archaeologist is concerned, yet reaches conclusions
more definite and arrives at a nearer approximation to truth than any
who occupy themselves in the same area with manifold and mysterious
indications of early humanity's sojourn. The granite upheaval during
that awful revolt of matter represented by the creation of Dartmoor has
been assigned to a period between the Carboniferous and Permian eras;
but whether the womb of one colossal volcano or the product of a
thousand lesser eruptions threw forth this granite monster, none may yet
assert. Whether Dartmoor first appeared as a mighty shield, with one
uprising spike in its midst, or as a target supporting many separate
bosses cannot be declared; for the original aspect of the region has
long vanished, though our worn and weathered land of tors still shadows,
in its venerable desolation, those sublimer, more savage glories
manifested ere the eye of man or beast existed to receive an image of
them.

But the earliest human problems presented by Devon's watershed admit of
no sure solution, albeit they date from a time adjacent contrasted with
that wherein the land was born. Nature's message still endures for man
to read as his knowledge grows; but the records of our primal fellows
have grown dim and uncertain as the centuries rolled over them. There
exists, however, within the lofty, lonely kingdom of the granite, a
chain of human evidences extending from prehistoric ages to the ruined
shepherd's cot of yesterday. At many spots a spectator may perceive in
one survey the stone ruin of the Danmonian's habitation, and hypaethral
temple or forum, the heather-clad debris left by Elizabethan streamers
of alluvial tin, the inky peat-ridges from which a moorman has just cut
his winter firing. But the first-named objects, with ki