he tall
chimneys, thrusting in at the open windows--nor are there names for all
the flowers that bloom here, for all the mellow gold and crimson and
blue and yellow and purple that glow in the sunlight, and fade gently
into shadows of themselves as night falls. Beyond is the sea, all
round the flowering meadows of the marsh, behind the moors; to anyone
who has had the fortune to see Porlock Weir on such a day in May as
this I recall, when this England of ours seems, to our fancy, to gather
up all beauties of colour and sound and scent and sunlight of which the
long winter and the chill, reluctant spring have starved us, and offer
them all at once in immeasurable bounty, this village will seem to them
to have the loveliness of magic.

The beauty of Exmoor is a stranger beauty and more remote than that of
these lovely villages. It is the beauty of space, I suppose, and the
great open arch of the sky; it is the clouds and cloud shadows, the
changing light from dawn to evening through the blazing colourless
hours of midsummer noon to the tender light of the falling day, when
the land lies in long, suave, misty curves; it is the swirl of mist
down its hillsides, and the solemn banking of great heavy rain-clouds,
purple and black, above it, that gives it so rich and varied a beauty:
for it is like a great open canvas, on which an artist's hand makes
wonderful pictures of a myriad changes of sun and shadow. Anyone who
has seen Exmoor, as Mr. Widgery has seen and loved and painted it, on a
still September night, under the mellow splendour of the harvest moon,
high above the infinite shadowy blue of the horizon and the misty moor,
has seen a rare loveliness he must travel far to match.

[Illustration: Harvest Moon, Exmoor]

The "forest" of Exmoor is about thirty-five miles in extent from east
to west, and twenty from north to south, running from the valley of
Crowcombe, near the Quantocks, to Hangman Point, near Combe Martin. It
is a stretch of country which makes its appeal to the sportsman, the
antiquarian, the artist, and the mere idle, happy walker; it is a
little country within a country, having many peculiarities of scenery
and structure, plant life and animal life, history and custom, peculiar
to itself.

And, firstly, though from Saxon times until 1818 it ranked as a "royal
forest," it is not a forest at all. Trees will hardly live on Exmoor,
not even the black fir, the hardiest tree of all; only here and there