striking against the rocky tors caused the rainfall to be so heavy that the Moor had been named the “Land of Streams.”  One of the bogs near the centre of the Moor was never dry, and formed a kind of shallow lake out of which rose five rivers, the Ockment or Okement, the Taw, the Tavy, the Teign, and the Dart, the last named and most important having given its name to the Moor.  Besides these, the Avon, Erme, Meavy, Plym, and Yealm, with many tributary brooks, all rise in Dartmoor.

Devonshire was peculiar in having no forests except that of Dartmoor, which was devoid of trees except a small portion called Wistman’s Wood in the centre, but the trees in this looked so old and stunted as to make people suppose they had existed there since the time of the Conquest, while others thought they had originally formed one of the sacred groves connected with Druidical worship, since legend stated that living men had been nailed to them and their bodies left there to decay.  The trees were stunted and only about double the height of an average-sized man, but with wide arms spread out at the top twisted and twined in all directions.  Their roots were amongst great boulders, where adders’ nests abounded, so that it behoved visitors to be doubly careful in very hot weather.  We could imagine the feelings of a solitary traveller in days gone by, with perhaps no living being but himself for miles, crossing this dismal moor and coming suddenly on the remains of one of these crucified sacrificial victims.

Not far from Wistman’s Wood was Crockern Tor, on the summit of which, according to the terms of an ancient charter, the Parliament dealing with the Stannary Courts was bound to assemble, the tables and seats of the members being hewn out of the solid rock or cut from great blocks of stone.  The meetings at this particular spot of the Devon and Cornwall Stannary men continued until the middle of the eighteenth century.  After the jury had been sworn and other preliminaries arranged, the Parliament adjourned to the Stannary towns, where its courts of record were opened for the administration of Justice among the “tinners,” the word Stannary being derived from the Latin “Stannum,” meaning tin.

Some of the tors still retained their Druidical names, such as Bel-Tor, Ham-Tor, Mis-Tor; and there were many remains of altars, logans, and cromlechs scattered over the moors, proving their great antiquity and pointing to the time when the priests of the Britons burned incense and offered human victims as sacrifices to Bel and Baal and to the Heavenly bodies.

There was another contingency to be considered in crossing Dartmoor in the direction we had intended—­especially in the case of a solitary traveller journeying haphazard—­and that was the huge prison built by the Government in the year 1808 on the opposite fringe of the Moor to accommodate prisoners taken during the French wars, and since converted into an ordinary convict settlement.  It was seldom that a convict escaped, for it was very difficult to cross the Moor, and the prison dress was so well known all over the district; but such cases had occurred, and one of these runaways, to whom a little money and a change of raiment would have been acceptable, might have been a source of inconvenience, if not of danger, to any unprotected traveller, whom he could have compelled to change clothing.