At comparatively trifling expense

At comparatively trifling expense

At comparatively trifling expense

A series of gentle declivities, plantations, a winding, full-flowing stream, seem only to require a suitable edifice and the hand of an artist gardener to make, at comparatively trifling expense, an abode unequalled in luxuriant and romantic beauty. We crossed the stream not by the narrow bridge, but by the ford; and, passing through the straggling stone village of Simon’s Bath, arrived in sight of the field where the Tattersall of the West was to sell the wild and tame horse stock bred on the moors. It was a field of some ten acres and a half, forming a very steep slope, with the upper path comparatively flat, the sloping side broken by a stone quarry, and dotted over with huge blocks of granite. At its base flowed an arm of the stream we had found margining our route. A substantial, but, as the event proved, not sufficiently high stone fence bounded the whole field. On the upper part, a sort of double pound, united by a narrow neck, with a gate at each end, had been constructed of rails, upwards of five feet in height. Into the first of these pounds, by ingenious management, all the ponies, wild and tame, had been driven. When the sale commenced, it was the duty of the herdsmen to separate two at a time, and drive them through the narrow neck into the pound before the auctioneer. Around a crowd of spectators of every degree were clustered ‘squires and clergymen, horse-dealers and farmers, from Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, as well as South Devon, and the immediate neighbourhood.