Excerpt from The Thief of Virtue Cloud-shadows swept a desert, and beneath their stains the bosom of the waste appeared to rise and fall, as though, not earth, but some enormous, animate creature of earth, panted here, and stretched its rugged immensity upon the midst of that wider world outspread around it. Dartmoor, beheld from a height above her central plains, sprang to a crown of tors, and rounded mightily on many a hog-backed hill. Within this amphitheatre twinkled the eastern arm of Dart, straggled a wood, and clustered a few cottages beside the river; while at distances remote from the central dwellings, sunk humbly beside this streamlet or beneath that steep, there shone out roof trees of little farms. The Moor encircled them in billowy plains of pallid yellow and dim green. Its faces rolled upon each other; they fell here to water-side; they ascended and broke where the granite burst through them in peaks and ra vines; they brightened where the ling bloom spattered their leagues with light. A lesser fret of inherent colour was manifest under that mightier robe where sunshine blazed and shadows sped. One garment covered all things in permanent mosaic of herbage and stone, stark peat and sparkling water - the intrinsic raiment of the Moor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.