And as I heard the song of the gondoliers as they went their way—­the song dying away in the distance as the shadows of the sundown closed around me—­I felt that they were singing the requiem of the only love that had ever entered my heart.

THE PARSON’S DAUGHTER OF OXNEY COLNE

By Anthony Trollope

(London Review, 2 March 1861)

The prettiest scenery in all England—­and if I am contradicted in that assertion, I will say in all Europe—­is in Devonshire, on the southern and southeastern skirts of Dartmoor, where the rivers Dart and Avon and Teign form themselves, and where the broken moor is half cultivated, and the wild-looking uplands fields are half moor.  In making this assertion I am often met with much doubt, but it is by persons who do not really know the locality.  Men and women talk to me on the matter who have travelled down the line of railway from Exeter to Plymouth, who have spent a fortnight at Torquay, and perhaps made an excursion from Tavistock to the convict prison on Dartmoor.  But who knows the glories of Chagford?  Who has walked through the parish of Manaton?  Who is conversant with Lustleigh Cleeves and Withycombe in the moor?  Who has explored Holne Chase?  Gentle reader, believe me that you will be rash in contradicting me unless you have done these things.

There or thereabouts—­I will not say by the waters of which little river it is washed—­is the parish of Oxney Colne.  And for those who would wish to see all the beauties of this lovely country a sojourn in Oxney Colne would be most desirable, seeing that the sojourner would then be brought nearer to all that he would delight to visit, than at any other spot in the country.  But there is an objection to any such arrangement.  There are only two decent houses in the whole parish, and these are—­or were when I knew the locality—­small and fully occupied by their possessors.  The larger and better is the parsonage in which lived the parson and his daughter; and the smaller is the freehold residence of a certain Miss Le Smyrger, who owned a farm of a hundred acres which was rented by one Farmer Cloysey, and who also possessed some thirty acres round her own house which she managed herself, regarding herself to be quite as great in cream as Mr. Cloysey, and altogether superior to him in the article of cider.  ‘But yeu has to pay no rent, Miss,’ Farmer Cloysey would say, when Miss Le Smyrger expressed this opinion of her art in a manner too defiant.  ‘Yeu pays no rent, or yeu couldn’t do it.’  Miss Le Smyrger was an old maid, with a pedigree and blood of her own, a hundred and thirty acres of fee-simple land on the borders of Dartmoor, fifty years of age, a constitution of iron, and an opinion of her own on every subject under the sun.