Gaining the town, we were refused admittance to the Three Crowns, say what we might in extenuation of our stubble chins. We moved stealthily upon the King's Arms, and held consultation in a dark passage there. Alas, the King's Arms was full, egg-full, of literary and fisher folk from London

town.

Finally, holding our courage in both hands, we rapped at the whitest of the white cots. A lady answered us. I said in a voice manly and persuasive and gentle and gently humorous, enfolding her, as it were, in an appreciation of our plight, that we were archæologists, groping in darkness. The Three Crowns was full (God pardon me), the King's Arms was full, and the night promising cold. She hesitated; I made as if to turn away, in stoical but none the less despairing realization that I asked too much. But stay: a smile edged that lip, a sweet willingness informed every corner of that pink and white and lovely being, and overmatching, in her low native Devon, the sweet modulation of my own tones, she bade me step into her parlor. What is it Hazlitt hath said about a parlor: "To hold to the universe by a dish of sweetbreads, and to be known by no other name than "the gentleman in the parfor." Surely we were known by no other name than that, nor any the less well received in consequence.

We came to rest, however, in the kitchen. The peace of that Devon was as profound as a confession of St. Augustine. Our host, a huge man, with brown eyes, said perpetually, 'Yes, yes,' with the intonation of 'Hear, hear'; and once roused himself, getting up, intellectually, on one elbow, to ask, 'Who was this Darwin? An odd name, now; yes, yes,' — and then relapsing, expiring, but continuing to thwart vacuum of the space which his material presence had invaded.

His wife, very pretty, and more intelligent, was rather proud of her archæologists, who were so bold in tampering with the system of this Darwin. Her cheeks were pink and white beyond analogy, shadowed each by a brown curl which fell past either temple. She sewed deftly, illuminated by the fire in the grate. She was like a vignette, in her preciseness of line.

She invited me into the arm-chair; I took it. Abashed by that proximity, she proposed a cup of tea. The pot boiled; her husband continued in accordance with a judicious selection of the laws of Aristotle, Harvey, and Sir Isaac Newton. When I was on the point of pouring the tea into a cup, she made a sudden exclamation. I looked wildly up, and my eye fell first upon the old clock, which was kept an hour fast to please the children (children, saith the elderly essayist with a sigh, as of lavender and lost years, can always give Time a handicap), and then upon her face. She hovered over me, timid but desperately put about. Her husband's brown eyes blinked inscrutably, near together in an inscrutable face. I held the pot halted in mid-air.

'In Devonshire,' she said, with one hand upon her dress, of a blue and white print, 'in Devonshire we pour the tea upon the milk.'

But I could only think of a poem by Robert Herrick. 'Loathed Devonshire,' indeed. Let him look to his little buttery, and within, his little bin.

Thus we see that archæology is a thing of phases, like a malignant fever.

III

We decided to make a preliminary ramble without the pick and shovel. We said nothing very coherent in defense of this determination, but the truth is we were both afraid of meeting with the duchess. Whenever I think

of a duchess, I think of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, and I remember that she spoke harshly to her little boy, and beat him when he sneezed.

A steep road spiraled out of Chagford toward the moor, fragrant with hawthorn, and bordered by small whitewashed cots, with war-thick walls, and thatch heavy with green moss. Near the top of the hill was a stone basin, which a brook overflowed with crystal water. The petal of a bluebell twirled in an eddy, and Porthos, pleased as a wood-nymph, but bulkier and hairier, pillared himself on a vast yellow forearm, and drank.

Struck by the simple picture of man communing with nature, I dragged out the Golden Treasury, and read a lyric of Shelley's. This is always disheartening to Porthos. He is one of those, for example, who hold that the Person from Porlock ought to have knocked sooner on poor Sam's door.

And shortly we were upon the moor. I had expected a plain; but the moor rolled under us in great brown waves of heather-covered granite. There were both gorse and heather there, but which was gorse and which was heather was not for a mere archæologist to settle. Suffice it that either the gorse or the heather was spiky, and either the heather or the gorse was in yellow bloom. Sheep, and wild moor ponies, and little shaggy colts, like animals from a Noah's ark, were dotted over it — all of them, even the little colts, with their tails solemnly presented to the prevailing quarter of the wind. For the wind that sweeps the moor is bitter, and never dies.

Now when a moor like this, or a waste of any kind, figures in a book, there is always some lofty-spirited person who ranges it, drawing deep breaths of the wild wind that blows there, cheeks glowing, hair and skirts fluttering about her (it is usually a

woman; there's not much you can say about a pair of peg-top trousers in a high wind). Now when we left the road, this was precisely what we were going to do we were going to range the moor. But after a mile or two of wading through spiky gorse (or heather), struggling up a hill, walking a dozen steps across the top, and plunging down, with the prospect of a worse rise dead ahead, — after an hour or two of this, a man begins to lay the mænad-viking idea up to the other fellow. It becomes time to pose as a sane man led away by the folly of others.

I said, 'Look here; there's a mire. dead ahead, Fox Tor Mire. Had n't we better bear ship?'

'Bit sodden, eh?' said Porthos. He was encouraged by my giving in to place his foot on a rock, and look proudly out over the landscape, with an Eric the Red light in his eyes.

Fox Tor Mire was a bit sodden; it was yellow, rheumy, full of hummocks, quiverings, and unpleasant fissures.

'If we keep on,' he continued, 'we strike Cranmer Pool.'

'Nothing there,' I answered, 'but a letter-box, and the reflections of the last fool who went out there, on finding himself so far from home. Now my idea is to investigate some of these tors. That one on our left, for instance.'

These tors were great piles of splintering granite, and they could be seen to crown nearly all the hills about us. We singled one out, and walked toward it a long time, the camera assaulting my spine every time I took a hummock, and the bog creeping steadily through my canvas shoes. A gleam of sun fell on one distant hill, and the hill seemed soft, dune-like, colored a leprous yellow, like Arabia on the road to Mecca; its granite top like some hideous disjointed lizard, or again, coming nearer, like a monolithic throne, with jagged

side-arms. And finally it was like nothing at all but a ruined peak of stone. We found ourselves upon a huge ridge, with a sky-line as long and gentle as the sky-line of Vesuvius, upon which sat four of these giant tors, weathered by wind and rain into strange likenesses, shifting with the point of view into things still more vast and fanciful. No mind could rest upon these bold outlines, these ragged crevices, these square lichen-grown towers and fallen battlements, without conjecture least of all an archæologist's. The might of speculation alone could lift back these fragments into the places they had once filled, and invest them with significance dreadful or heroic. What the Druid with his beard or the stone man with his bludgeon could not do, the archeologist will do by the simple movement of an eager and pursuing mind. When the orgasm is upon him, in a very turgescence of conjecture he will re-create the ages, and bring forward and put under a glass and the public guardianship a whole civilization smothered under tumbled stone.

We went back through time twelve thousand years, and with less start than a man would get for a twentyfour-foot running jump; and behold, we were sitting on top of the hut of a man of the stone age.

"The man who would be fool enough to deny,' said Porthos, 'that this place has been lived in, deserves to be made to live in it himself."

A big slab of granite projected like a natural roof from the solid rock; and an immense block had been pushed in under this roof, failing the wall of rock by perhaps two feet. The space thus enclosed was about two by two by eight; and at our end a triangular wedge of granite had fallen back, which might once have fitted nicely over this opening. Porthos, on his hands and knees,

was half in, and his voice rang hollowly there.

'Something in here,' he cried, strangulated. He wormed his enormous body farther in. The very taps of his shoes were interested. After a time he came out, disheveled, raked fore and aft by the clammy stone. He gripped an object tightly in one heavy fist. This object was covered with dirt, and glinted. It was a whiskey bottleBlack and White '96.

'Glass,' said Porthos, disillusioned. This was the stone age!

'But look here,' said Porthos, 'there's a shelf in there for a club or a baby. Two could lie side by side once you get in. And there seem to be flint markings on the roof.'

We proceeded excitedly to the northern entrance. There was something tremendously tertiary about that. There was, to begin with, a stone very like an elementary door there. In my paper 'Paleolithic Propositions' (subsequently altered to 'Triassic Trifles') for The Archeologist, I was very particular about the shape of this door. Projecting from the rock at the left of the door was a rudimentary hinge. The door weighed nearly half a ton. We were able seamen, but we could n't stir it from its bed. It is quite apparent, therefore, that the former tenant, who could put out a hand leisurely and lift his door onto its hinge, must have been of no common physical powers. We were at last able, by tearing away dirt and lichen, to discover the depression or socket in the door which had been calculated to receive the hinge. Its measurements were right for that purpose.

While I was bringing the magnifying glass to bear on this, Porthos had started on the run for the second tor. This was huger than the other, though not so fruitful. The huts here were in the form of right angles with two openings leading away from the angle.

'No cul-de-sac for him,' said Porthos exultingly. If a dinosaur drove him in here, and hung around, he'd go out there.'

And indeed there was a screen of rock interposed, so that he could make good his escape without the dinosaur's seeing him. A flight of something like worn steps- they were worn steps led up to this abode; and the palæolithic one had collected upon his roof an assortment of boulders to hurl down upon his enemies. The hillside was strewn with those he had already thrown, and yet he had died prepared, with ammunition on his roof. What colossal courage, to support life in the midst of such menace!

Some of these stone tenements were outlying from the tor itself, and the plumbing was more open. We easily determined that these had been let out. In one of them we found three flints lying on a shelf. What could be easier than to come to the conclusion that this had been a three-flint apartment, with light housekeeping privileges. The tenant had left the rent on the parlor mantel. Tempus fugit, and it is better form now to put it on the piano under the bust of Beethoven. But we live and learn.

Suddenly we came upon a masterpiece of craft. A block of stone weighing many tons had been raised at one end, and a wedge of stone inserted.

'A trap,' cried Porthos. 'Nothing could be plainer. You put some succulent root under there; the dinosaur, endeavoring to extract it with his trunk, dislodges the wedge, and down comes the rock. Then you steal up with your club and clout him.'

'Had a dinosaur a trunk?' I wondered.

'Of course,' retorted Porthos. "They would n't have been fools enough to lay a trap for a trunk, if there had n't been any trunk, would they? He could have

worked it out with his tail, anyhow.' I stared stupefied into the vista opened by this rending logic.

It was about then that we stumbled upon that curious and seemingly desultory heap, which later figured so conspicuously in the pages of The Archaologist as the dinosaur-dodger. In appearance it was crustacean, not unlike a giant turtle. At either end of the ellipse was cut or fashioned a hole, large enough to admit the human animal. The theory which my colleague advanced with such learning and elaboration, and which was so bitterly contested by envious minds, was this: The dinosaur in full charge is stopped by this aperture, through which his prey has squirmed. Irate, he rushes around the obstruction, only to see the chase disappearing through the other hole. Picture the enraged animal lumbering time after time around this structure, panting, reeling, a mist coming before his eyes; until he sinks fainting, either in a death-agony induced by over-exertion, or at least in a fatigue rendering him helpless before a blow from the thong-bound flint which should dispatch him. Could any disinterested mind hear of this theory without a thrill of instant and unconditional belief?

IV

But we return to the moor, the granite setting to this mute and moving drama of the cunning of the past. The sun was gone from the brown and gray and yellow peaks; and down all the folds and valleys of the moor a mist was rolling swiftly in. Rightly are these stolid moor-men called the children of the mist. Living in the vague, pixies affright them; dragons of the air trail scaly golden tails across the murky sun; shapes and horrors swim disembodied in the rolling seas of fog, and sit on the tops of the ancient stone crosses