s. When they were made is not known, but in 552
they were a British defence against the Saxons, who captured them after
a bitter fight and overran the plain. Five centuries later William the
Norman reviewed his army here, and after the first Domesday survey
summoned all the landholders of England to the number of sixty thousand,
who here swore fealty to him. The Normans strengthened it with a castle,
and soon a cathedral also rose at Old Sarum, while a town grew around
them. But all have disappeared, though now there can be traced the
outlines of streets and houses and the foundations of the old cathedral.
When the clergy removed to Salisbury it is said they determined the new
site by an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old Sarum, and moving the
cathedral soon attracted the people. Old Sarum for some time remained a
strong fortress with many houses, but the cathedral was taken down in
1331 and its materials used for building the famous spire at Salisbury.
The castle decayed, the town was gradually deserted, and as long ago as
the sixteenth century we are told there was not a single house left
there. And such it is to this day. Climbing the steep face of the hill,
the summit is found fenced by a vast earthen rampart and ditch enclosing
twenty-seven acres with an irregular circle, the height from the bottom
of the ditch to the top of the rampart being over one hundred feet. A
smaller inner rampart as high as the outer one made the central citadel.
Nearly all the stone has long ago been carried off to build Salisbury,
and weeds and brushwood have overrun the remarkable fortress that has
come down to us from such venerable antiquity. Under the English
"rotten-borough" system Old Sarum enjoyed the privilege of sending two
members to Parliament for three centuries after it ceased to be
inhabited. The old tree under which the election was held still exists,
and the elder Pitt, who lived near by, was first sent to Parliament as a
representative of Old Sarum's vacant mounds.

STONEHENGE.

A few miles' farther journey to the northward over the hills and
valleys, and among the sheep that also wander on Salisbury Plain, brings
us to that remarkable relic of earlier ages which is probably the
greatest curiosity in England--Stonehenge. When the gigantic stones were
put there, and what for, no man knows. Many are the unanswered questions
asked about them, for the poet says:

"Thou noblest monument of Albion's isle!
Whether b