It is pleasanter to turn back to the moor itself--to topics less out of character with it. Foremost appear stories of magic, black and white, ancient beliefs and legends without end. Mr King, whose knowledge of the country was at once vast and minute, is quoted as having said 'that he believed almost every form of superstition or superstitious observances condemned in the Penitential of Bartholomew, Bishop of Exeter, 1161-1184, might be found sheltering itself under the Dartmoor Tors.' (This remark must have been made about the middle of the nineteenth century.) 'The same wild creed has been handed down from generation to generation; the same spots on the lonely moor, and the same gloomy pools in the river, that were shunned by his forefathers, are avoided as "critical" (to use his own word) by the Devonshire peasant now ... and whoever may find himself in the heart of its lonely wastes when daylight is closing, and the air seems to fill with
'"Undescribed sounds That come a-swooning over hollow ground, And wither drearily on barren moors,"
will scarcely wonder that the spirits of the elder world should not yet have been effectually dislodged from their ancient solitudes.... The Pixies, thoroughly mischievous elves, who delight to lead all wanderers astray, dwell in the clefts of broken granite, and dance on the green sward by the side of the hill streams; ... sometimes, but very rarely, they are seen dancing by the streams dressed in green, the true livery of the small people. They ride horses at night, and tangle their manes into inextricable knots. They may be heard pounding their cider and threshing their wheat far within the recesses of their "house" on Sheepstor--a cavern formed by overhanging blocks of granite. Deep river pools and deceitful morasses, over which the cotton grass flutters its white tassels, are thought to be the "gates" of their country, where they possess diminutive flocks and herds of their own. Malicious, yet hardly demoniacal, they are precisely Dryden's "spirits of a middle sort"--
"Too black for heaven, and yet too white for hell, Who just dropped half-way down, nor lower fell"
--a character which cannot, however, be assigned to their unearthly companions, the wish-hounds. These have no redeeming tinge of white, and belong to the gloomiest portion of the underworld.'