Dartmoor Idylls Author:Sabine Baring-Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SNAILY HOUSE The day was drawing in—a nasty day, with lumbering clouds rolling up from the north-west bursting with ice-cold showers. The spot, moreover, w... more »as about as nasty an one as could have been found for exposure on such a day, and for encountering the driving rain, chill as thawed hailstones, and nearly as hard as hailstones unthawed. This spot was the road that crosses Dartmoor from Moreton Hampstead to Tavistock. The whole of this wide, howling wilderness is traversed by one road only, with two branches, forming the letter Y. One branch goes north-east to Moreton, the other south-east to Ashburton, from a point above Two Bridges—where, by the way, of bridges there is but one—situated about half-way through Dartmoor. The spot on which we are looking at this moment is half-way up the left-hand branch, precisely where that road reaches its highest elevation, fifteen hundred feet above the sea level, and where is planted the highest wayside inn in England. All round, far as the eye could reach, only brown moor rising into ridges, falling away into deep valleys, the shoulders scarred as though they had been lashed by the knout of the Russian, and healed over in welts— the traces of ancient tin-streamers' works. The wind came on cutting as a ploughshare from the cold staring eye of the wind, to the north-west, over which hung an ink- black frown heavy with threat. It moaned in the heather, it piped in the rushes, it sobbed in the bracken, and it screamed as in the agony and rage combined of a tortured idiot, through the loose stone walls that were thrown up to mark tin-bounds, walls of stone lace-work, without mortar, and riddled with interstices. If the day was one of the worst conceivable, and the spot one of the most exposed, those struggling along the ro...« less