"Most of the moor is a chase or forest, which as I'm sure you know does not necessarily mean trees, and here most emphatically does not. In this sense, a forest denotes a wild reserve for the crown to hunt, although I imagine the Prince of Wales must find the game somewhat limited on the moor itself, unless he is fond of rabbits. Much of it is a common, grazed by the adjoining parishes with fees collected at a yearly gathering up of the animals, called the 'drift.' Other parts of it are privately held, with an interesting legal right of a holder's survivors to claim an additional eight acres upon the death of each subsequent holder. These 'newtakes' at one time ate into the duchy's holdings, but are not often claimed now, because the traditional moor men are dying off, and their sons are moving to the cities. Do you know, when I was here thirty years ago it was not impossible to find a child of the moor who had never seen a coin of the realm? Now—" He gave out a brief cough of laughter. "The other day in the Saracen's Head pub, right out in the middle of the moor, one of the natives was singing an Al Jolson song."

"You've been up on the moor, then? Recently?" I asked.

"I travelled across it from Exeter, yes."

A hike like that might account for his heavier use of brandy than normal, I thought, as well as his position in front of the hottest part of the fire. He went on before I could ask after his rheumatism.

"The people of the moor are what one might expect: hard as granite, with low expectations of what life has to give, often nearly illiterate but with a superb verbal memory and possessed of the occasional flare of poetry and imagination. They are, in fact, like the tors they live among, those odd piles of fantastically weathered granite that grace the tops of a number of hills: rock hard, well worn, and decidedly quirky."

"A description which could also apply to our host," I murmured, and took a sip of the surprisingly good and undoubtedly old brandy in my glass.

"Indeed. He may not have been born on the moor itself, but it is in him now. It is not paternalism speaking in him—or not only paternalism. He is truly and deeply concerned about the stirs and currents abroad on the moor. I wouldn't be surprised if he can feel them from here."

"So you agree there's something wrong up there?" I heard the last two words come out of my mouth with a definite emphasis, and thought with irritation that this habit of referring to a deserted bit of landscape as if it were another planet seemed to be contagious.

"There's certainly something stirring, though truth to tell I cannot read the currents well enough to see if it be for ill or not. I will say I received a faint impression that the moor was readying itself for a convulsion of some sort, though whether an eruption or a sudden flowering I couldn't say."