There is a desolation that no natural scene has power to invoke.  The labour of Nature’s thousand forces upon earth’s face may awaken awe before their enduring record, but can conjure no sense of sorrow; for high mountains, huge waste places and rivers calling shall make us feel small enough, not sad; but cast into the vast theatre some stone that marks a man’s grave, some ruined aboriginal hut or roofless cottage, some hypæthral meeting-place or arena of deserted human activity, and emotions rise to accentuate the scene.  Henceforth the desert is peopled with ghosts of men and women; and their hopes and ambitions, their triumphs, and griefs glimmer out of dream pictures and tune the beholder to a sentiment of mournfulness.

Such a scene on a scale unusually spacious may be found in the central waste of Dartmoor, nigh Postbridge.  Here, where marshes stretch, all ribbed with black peat cuttings, between the arms of Dart, where Higher White Tor rises northward p. 208and the jagged summits of lesser peaks slope southerly to Crockern, there lies a strange congeries of modern buildings rotting into dust and rust at the song of a stream.  Even the lonely groves that shield these ruins are similarly passing to decay; but many trees still flourish there, and under the shadows of them, or upon the banks of the Cherry-brook that winds in the midst and babbles its way to the mother-river, stand scattered remains of a considerable factory.  Now only a snipe drums or a plover mews plaintively, where some short years ago was great hum and stir of business and a colony of men engaged upon most dangerous toil.  Rows of whitewashed buildings still peep from the dark grove or stud those undulating hillocks that tend moorward beyond it.  Tall grey chimneys rise here and there, and between certain shattered buildings, linking the same together, great water-wheels appear.  These from their deep abodes thrust forth shattered spokes and crooked limbs and claws.  They slumber half in gloom, like fossil monsters partially revealed.  From their dilapidated jaws there glitters the slime of unclean creatures; moss hides the masses of their putrefied bones; huge liverworts clothe their decay, and hart’s-tongue ferns loll from their cracks and clefts, and thrive in the eternal twilight beneath them.  Once twin pairs of grinders turned here, and the last aspect of these is even more p. 209uncouth than that of the water-wheels that drove them.  Their roofs are blown away and the rollers beneath are cased in rust and moss.  Willows and grasses and the flowers of the waste flourish above their ruins; broom, dock, rush, choke the old watercourses; crowfoot mantles the stagnant pools that remain; and all is chaos, wreck and collapse.  For here spreads the scene of a human failure, the grave of an unsuccessful enterprise.  Its secret may still be read in dank strips of old proclamations hanging upon notice-boards within the ruins, and telling that men made gunpowder here; but those precautions necessary to establish the factory upon a site remote from any populous district indirectly achieved its ruin, for profits were swallowed by the cost of carriage from a situation so inaccessible.

At gloaming of an autumn day one living thing only moved amid the old powder-mills, and he felt no emotion in presence of that scene, for it was the playground of his life; his eyes had opened within a few score yards of it.  Young David Daccombe knew every hole and corner of the various workshops, and had his own different goblin names for the quaint tools still lumbering many a rotting floor, and the massive machinery, left as not worth cost of removal.  Mystery lurked in countless dark recesses, and Davey had made secret discoveries too and was lord of tremendous, treasured wonders p. 210hidden within the labyrinths of these crumbling mills.

But at this moment all things were forgotten before a supreme and new experience.  The boy had just caught his first trout, and a little fingerling fish now flapped and gasped out its life under his admiring eyes.  Davey was a plain child, with a narrow brow and hard mouth.  Now he smelt the trout, patted it, chuckled over his capture, then casting down an osier rod, with its hook and a disgorged worm halfway up the gut, he prepared to rush home and display his triumph to his mother.  As he climbed up from the stream and reached a little bridge that crossed it, his small face puckered into a fear, for he heard himself called harshly, knew the voice and felt little love for the speaker.

Out of the deepening gloom under the fir trees a young man appeared with a gun under his arm.

“Be that you, Davey, an’ did I see a rod?  If so, I’ll break it in pieces, I warn ’e.  Fishin’ season ended last Saturday, an’ here’s the keeper’s awn brother poachin’.  A nice thing!”

“Oh, Dick!  I’ve catched one!  First ever I really catched.  Won’t mother be brave an’ glad to eat un?  Ban’t very big, but a real trout.  I be just takin’ it home-along.”

“You’ll do no such thing, you little rascal.  Give it to me this instant moment, or else I’ll make you.”

p. 211Richard Daccombe approached and towered over his brother.  It was easy to see that they were near of kin.

“Please, Dick—just this wance—’tis awnly a li’l tiny feesh—first ever I took, too.  An’ I swear I’ll not feesh no more—honour bright.  Please—for mother never won’t believe I ackshually catched one if her doan’t see it.”

“Give it to me, or I’ll take it, I tell you, you dirty little thief.”