of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the
vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was
great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.

As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware that its summit,
hitherto the highest object in the whole prospect round, was surmounted
by something higher. It rose from the semiglobular mound like a spike
from a helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative stranger might have
been to suppose it the person of one of the Celts who built the barrow,
so far had all of modern date withdrawn from the scene. It seemed a sort
of last man among them, musing for a moment before dropping into eternal
night with the rest of his race.

There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath. Above the plain
rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose
the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere
than on a celestial globe.

Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure give
to the dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obvious
justification of their outline. Without it, there was the dome without
the lantern; with it the architectural demands of the mass were
satisfied. The scene was strangely homogeneous, in that the vale, the
upland, the barrow, and the figure above it amounted only to unity.
Looking at this or that member of the group was not observing a complete
thing, but a fraction of a thing.

The form was so much like an organic part of the entire motionless
structure that to see it move would have impressed the mind as a strange
phenomenon. Immobility being the chief characteristic of that whole
which the person formed portion of, the discontinuance of immobility in
any quarter suggested confusion.

Yet that is what happened. The figure perceptibly gave up its fixity,
shifted a step or two, and turned round. As if alarmed, it descended on
the right side of the barrow, with the glide of a water-drop down a bud,
and then vanished. The movement had been sufficient to show more clearly
the characteristics of the figure, and that it was a woman's.

The reason of her sudden displacement now appeared. With her dropping
out of sight on the right side, a newcomer, bearing a burden, protruded
into the sky on the left side, ascended the tumulus, and deposited the
burden on the top. A second followed, then a third, a fourth, a fifth,
and ultimat