The people hadn't any metal to work
with, poor creatures, until the Bronze Age, and they clothed themselves
in skins, which I suppose their dressmakers and tailors made when the
sheep and cows that wore them first had been cut up and eaten. I wonder
if girls were pretty in those days, or men handsome, and if anyone
cared? But I suppose knowing the difference between ugliness and beauty
is as old as Adam and Eve. If Eve hadn't been pretty, Adam wouldn't have
looked at her, but would have waited in the hope of something better.
The first sight of Princetown only intensified the loneliness of the
moor, somehow, partly because it loomed so gray and grim, partly,
perhaps, because we knew it to be a prison town. The dark buildings
looked as much a natural growth of the moor as those ruined temples on
the horizon, which were tors. It was almost impossible to believe that
Plymouth was only fifteen miles away. And the sombreness and gloom of
the melancholy place increased instead of diminished as we drew nearer
to it, after leaving behind us the pleasant oasis of Tor Bridge and its
little hotel that anglers and walkers love.
The prison settlement was stuck like a black vice-spot in the midst of
wide purity.
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