Modern man has also fretted the wide expanse, has scratched its surface and dropped a little sweat and blood; but his mansion and his cot and his grave are no more; plutonic rock is the only tablet on which any human story has been scribbled to endure.  Castles and manor-houses have vanished from the moorland confines like the cloudy palaces of a dream; the habitations of the mining folk shall not be seen to-day, and their handiwork quickly returns to primitive waste; fern and furze hide the robbed cairn and bury the shattered cross; flood and lightning and tempest roam over the darkness of a region sacred to them, and man stretches his hand for what Nature touches not; but the menhir yet stands erect, the “sacred” circles are circles still, and these, with like records of a dim past, present to thinking travellers the crown and first glory of the Moor.  Integral portions of the ambient desolation are they—­rude toys that infant humanity has left in Mother Nature’s lap; and the spectacle of them twines a golden thread of human interest into the fabric of each lonely heath, each storm-scarred mountain-top and heron-haunted stream.  Nothing is changed since skin-clad soldiers and shepherds strode these wastes, felt their hearts quicken at sight of women, or their hands clench over celt-headed spears before danger.  Here the babies of the stone-folk, as the boys and girls to-day, stained their little mouths and ringers with fruit of briar and whortle; the ling bloomed then as now; the cotton-grass danced its tattered plume; the sphagnum mosses opened emerald-green eyes in marsh and quaking bog; and hoary granite scattered every ravine and desert valley.  About those aboriginal men the Moor spread forth the same horizon of solemn enfolding hills, and where twinkle the red hides of the moor-man’s heifers through upstanding fern, in sunny coombs and hawthorn thickets, yesterday the stone-man’s cattle roamed and the little eyes of a hidden bear followed their motions.  Here, indeed, the first that came in the flesh are the last to vanish in their memorials; here Nature, to whom the hut-circle of granite, all clad in Time’s lichen livery of gold and grey, is no older than the mushroom ring shining like a necklace of pearls within it—­Nature may follow what course she will, may build as she pleases, may probe to the heart of things, may pursue the eternal Law without let from the pigmies; and here, if anywhere from man’s precarious standpoint, shall he perceive the immutable and observe a presentment of himself in those ephemera that dance above the burn at dawn, and ere twilight passes gather up their gauze wings and perish.