welcomed even a misfortune. She
had heard that from the summit of the pillar four counties could be seen.
Whatever pleasurable effect was to be derived from looking into four
counties she resolved to enjoy to-day.

The fir-shrouded hill-top was (according to some antiquaries) an old
Roman camp,--if it were not (as others insisted) an old British castle,
or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field of Witenagemote,--with remains
of an outer and an inner vallum, a winding path leading up between their
overlapping ends by an easy ascent. The spikelets from the trees formed
a soft carpet over the route, and occasionally a brake of brambles barred
the interspaces of the trunks. Soon she stood immediately at the foot of
the column.

It had been built in the Tuscan order of classic architecture, and was
really a tower, being hollow with steps inside. The gloom and solitude
which prevailed round the base were remarkable. The sob of the
environing trees was here expressively manifest; and moved by the light
breeze their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted
pendulums; while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar's sides, or
occasionally clicked in catching each other. Below the level of their
summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never
pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation. Pads of moss grew
in the joints of the stone-work, and here and there shade-loving insects
had engraved on the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning; but
curious and suggestive. Above the trees the case was different: the
pillar rose into the sky a bright and cheerful thing, unimpeded, clean,
and flushed with the sunlight.

The spot was seldom visited by a pedestrian, except perhaps in the
shooting season. The rarity of human intrusion was evidenced by the
mazes of rabbit-runs, the feathers of shy birds, the exuviae of reptiles;
as also by the well-worn paths of squirrels down the sides of trunks, and
thence horizontally away. The fact of the plantation being an island in
the midst of an arable plain sufficiently accounted for this lack of
visitors. Few unaccustomed to such places can be aware of the insulating
effect of ploughed ground, when no necessity compels people to traverse
it. This rotund hill of trees and brambles, standing in the centre of a
ploughed field of some ninety or a hundred acres, was probably visited
less frequently than a rock would have been visited in a lake o