The Virgin in Judgment

s and south by the Abbot's Way to Plym Steps the streamlet flows; then she gathers volume and melody to enter a land of vanished men. By the lodges of the old stone p

are altered. For the turf, nibbled close at seasons, shows no death, but spreads in a uniform far-flung cloth of velvet, always close shorn and always green. Its texture may not be rivalled by any pasture known, and so fine has it become under this cropping of centuries that the very grass

s. Shell Top and Pen Beacon are the highest adjacent peaks of the Moor; and through th

out, and the metropolis of the rabbits, with natural and artificial burrows, extends to the very confines of the building. A cabbage-plot and a croft or two complete man's work here; while at nearer approa

ous, prosperous existence on the product of the warrens and other moorland industries. Rabbits were more valuable

. David Bowden was eight-and-twenty and Rhoda was twenty-one. A very unusual fraternity obtained between them, and the man's welfare meant far more to his sister than any other mundane interest. After David came Joshua, the master of the trappers, aged twenty-five; and he and the eldest girl, Sophia--a widow who had returned childless and moneyless to her home after two years of married life--were sworn friends. Then, a year younger than Rhoda, appeared Dorcas--a "sport" as Mr. Bowden called her, for she was t

me so familiar among the people round about, that when a man or woman breathed some utterly vain a

re fatness; her nose and mouth were especially beautiful; but her chin was a little heavy. Rhoda's hair was pale brown and in tone not specially attractive; but she possessed a great wealth of it; her feet and hands were large, yet finely modelled; her eyes had more than enough of virginal chill in their cool and pale grey depths. David somewhat resembled her. He was a clean-cut and sturdy man, standing his sister's height of five feet nine inches, and having a slow-featured face--handsome after a conventional type, yet lacking much expression or charm for the physiognomist. He shared his thoughts

, and sometimes black, were the inhabitants of the great burrows, but it seldom happened that a white one was observed. Occasionally they appeared, however, and occasionally they were

gh it was suspected that his estimates of loss were fanciful. Once the usual fees had been delayed by oversight, and Sir G

d how's Mr. Bowden faring? I'

ave done no lasting hurt here. In legions the rabbits lived. They swarmed, leapt from under the foot, bobbed with twinkling of white scuts through the fern and heather, sat up, all ears, on

ws. She flows through Bickleigh Vale and by Cann Quarry; she passes her own bridge, and anon, entering the waters of Laira, passes unmarked away to the salt blue sea; but she laves no scene more pregnant than these plains where the stone men sleep; she passes no monument heavier weighted with grandeur of eld than that titan menhir of Thrushelcombe by Ditsworthy, where, deep set in the prehistoric past, it stands sentinel over a hero's grave. Great beyond the common folk was he who won this memorial--a warrior

House of Ditsworthy. Notable and spacious mansions rise as the stream flows into civilisation; abodes, that have entered into history, lift their heads adjacent to its flood; but none