idly they followed each other, and sometimes the
puffs of vapour were exploded together, sometimes separately. For a
moment the girl felt puzzled; then she comprehended and laughed.

"'Tis the silly auld sheep!" she said to herself. "They 'm shakin 'theer
fleeces 'cause they knaw the rain's over-past. Bellwether did begin, I
warrant, then all the rest done the same."

Each remote member of the flock thus freed its coat from the accumulated
moisture of a long rainfall; then the huddled heap, in which they had
combined to withstand the weather and show tail to the western storm,
began to scatter. With coughs and sneezes the beasts wandered forward
again, and pursued their business of grazing.

Steadily the promises of the sky multiplied and Phoebe's impatience
increased. Her position did not, however, depend for comfort upon the
return of sunshine, for she stood out of the weather, where sundry giant
rocks to the number of five arose in a fantastic pile. Nature's primal
architects were responsible for the Pixies' Parlour, and upon the awful
morning of Dartmoor's creation these enormous masses had first been
hurled to their present position--outposts of the eternal granite,
though themselves widely removed from the central waste of the Moor.
This particular and gigantic monument of the past stands with its feet
in land long cultivated. Plough and harrow yearly skirt the Pixies'
Parlour; it rises to-day above yellow corn, to-morrow amid ripening
roots; it crowns the succeeding generations of man's industry, and
watches a ceaseless cycle of human toil. The rocks of which it is
composed form a sort of rude chamber, sacred to fairy folk since a time
before the memory of the living; briars and ivy-tods conceal a part of
the fabric; a blackthorn, brushed at this season with purple fruit,
rises above it; one shadowed ledge reveals the nightly roosting place of
hawk or raven; and marks of steel on the stone show clearly where some
great or small fragment of granite has been blasted from the parent pile
for the need of man. Multi-coloured, massive, and picturesque, the
Parlour, upon Phoebe Lyddon's visit to it, stood forth against the red
bosom of naked land; for a fierce summer had early ripened the vanished
harvest, and now its place was already ploughed again, while ashes of
dead fire scattered upon the earth showed where weed and waste had been
consumed after ingathering of the grain.

Patches of August blue now lightened th