Removed by many yards from the ring of human spectators, and scattered in wide order upon the flanks of the hill, stood tame beasts.  Sheep huddled there and bleated amazement, their fleeces touched by the flicker of the distant fire; red heifers and steers also faced the flame and chewed the cud upon a spectacle outside all former experience; while inquisitive ponies drew up in a wide radius, snorted and sniffed with delicate, dilated nostrils at the unfamiliar smell of the breeze, threw up their little heads, fetched a compass at top speed and so returned; then crowded flank to flank, shoulder to shoulder, and again blankly gazed at the fire which reflected itself in the whites of their shifty eyes.

Fitting the freakish antics of the red light, a carnival spirit, hard to rouse in northern hearts, awakened within this crowd of Devon men and women, old men and children.  There was in their exhilaration some inspiration from the joyous circumstance they celebrated; and something, too, from the barrel.  Dancing began and games, feeble by day but not lacking devil when pursued under cover of darkness.  There were hugging and kissing, and yells of laughter when amorous couples who believed themselves safe were suddenly revealed lip to lip and heart to heart by an unkind flash of fire.  Some, as their nature was, danced and screamed that flaming hour away; some sat blankly and smoked and gazed with less interest than the outer audience of dumb animals; some laboured amain to keep the bonfire at blaze.  These last worked from habit and forgot their broadcloth.  None bade them, but it was their life to be toiling; it came naturally to mind and muscle, and they laughed while they laboured and sweated.  A dozen staid groups witnessed the scene from surrounding eminences, but did not join the merrymakers.  Mr. Shorto-Champernowne, Doctor Parsons, and the ladies of their houses stood with their feet on a tumulus apart; and elsewhere Mr. Chapple, Charles Coomstock, Mr. Blee, and others, mostly ancient, sat on the granite, inspected the pandemonium spread before them, and criticised as experts who had seen bonfires lighted before the greater part of the present gathering was out of its cradle.  But no cynic praising of past time to the disparagement of the present marked their opinions.  Mr. Chapple indeed pronounced the fire brilliantly successful, and did not hesitate to declare that it capped all his experience in this direction.

“A braave blaze,” he said, “a blaze as gives the thoughtful eye an’ nose a tidy guess at what the Pit’s like to be.  Ess, indeed, a religious fire, so to say; an’ I warrant the prophet sat along just such another when he said man was born to trouble sure as the sparks fly up’ard.”

Somewhat earlier on the same night, under the northern ramparts of Dartmoor, and upon the long, creeping hill that rises aloft from Okehampton, then dips again, passes beneath the Belstones, and winds by Sticklepath and Zeal under Cosdon, there rattled a trap holding two men.  From their conversation it appeared that one was a traveller who now returned southward from a journey.