ndred fragments
that have similarly endured, chiefly fire imagination. Seen grey at
gloaming time, golden through sunny dawns, partaking in those spectral
transformations cast upon the moor by the movement of clouds, by the
curtains of the rain, by the silver of breaking day, the monotone of
night and the magic of the moon, these relics reveal themselves and
stand as a link between the present and the far past. Mystery broods
over them and the jealous wings of the ages hide a measure of their
secret. Thus far these lonely rings of horrent stones and the alignments
between them have concealed their story from modern man, and only in
presence of the ancient pound, the foundations of a dwelling, the
monolith that marked a stone-man's sepulchre, the robbed cairn and naked
kistvaen, may we speak with greater certainty and, through the
glimmering dawn of history and the records of Britain's earliest foes,
burrow back to aboriginal man on Dartmoor. Then research and imagination
rebuild the eternal rings of granite and, erecting upon them tall domes
of thatch and skins on wattle ribs, conceive the early village like a
cluster of gigantic mushrooms, whose cowls are uplifted in that rugged
fastness through the night of time. We see Palaeolithic man sink into
mother earth before the superior genius of his Neolithic successor; and
we note the Damnonian shepherds flourishing in lonely lodges and
preserving their flocks from the wolf, while Egypt's pyramids were still
of modern creation, and the stars twinkled in strange constellations,
above a world innocent as yet of the legends that would name them. The
stone-workers have vanished away, but their labour endures; their
fabricated flints still appear, brought to light from barrows and
peat-ties, from the burrows of rabbits and the mounds of the antiquary
mole; the ruins of their habitations, the theatres of their assemblies
and unknown ceremonies still stand, and probably will continue so to do
as long as Dartmoor's bosom lies bare to the storm and stress of the
ages.

Modern man has also fretted the wide expanse, has scratched its surface
and dropped a little sweat and blood; but his mansion and his cot and
his grave are no more; plutonic rock is the only tablet on which any
human story has been scribbled to endure. Castles and manor-houses have
vanished from the moorland confines like the cloudy palaces of a dream;
the habitations of the mining folk shall not be seen to-day, and t