god,
they had good reason to flatter themselves that it would attract his
attention. And I do think it was sensible to choose the sun for a god.
Next to our own true religion, that seems the most comforting. There was
your deity, in full sight, looking after one side or the other of his
world, all through the twenty-four hours.

I never felt more awe-stricken than I did passing under the shadow of
those great sentinel plinths, guarding their sunken altar, hiding their
own impenetrable mysteries. The winds seemed to blow more chill, and to
whisper strangely, as if trying to tell secrets we could never
understand. I love the legend of the Friar's Heel, but, after all, it's
only a mediaeval legend, and it's more interesting to think that, from
the middle of the sacrificial altar, the priest could see the sun rise
(at the summer solstice) just above that stupendous stone. I stood
there, imagining a white-robed Druid looking up, his knife suspended
over a fair girl victim, waiting to strike until his eye should meet the
red eye of the sun. Oh, I shall have bad dreams about Stonehenge, I
know! But I shan't mind, if I can dream about the Duke of Buckingham
digging for treasure there at midnight. And if I were like Du Maurier's
dear Peter Ibbetson, I could "dream back," and see at what far distance
the builders of Stonehenge got their mysterious syenite, and that one
black sandstone so different from the rest. I could dream who were the
builders; whether Phoenicians, or mourning Britons of Arthur's day--as
Geoffrey of Monmouth tells.

Sir Lionel and I like to think it was the Britons, for that gives him a
family feeling for the place, since he read out of a book Warton's
sonnet:

"Thou noblest monument of Albion's Isle,
Whether by Merlin's aid from Scythia's shore
To Amber's fatal plain Pendragon bore,
Huge frame of giants' hands, the mighty pile
To entomb his Britons slain by Hengist's guile,
Or Druid priests, sprinkled with human gore,
Taught 'mid the massy maze their mystic lore."

Next time, I want to see Stonehenge from an airship, or, at a pinch, a
balloon, because I can judge better of the original form, the two
circles and the two ellipses, which the handsomest policeman I ever saw
out of a Christmas Annual explained to me, pacing the rough grass. He
lives at Stonehenge all day, with a dog, and they are both guardians. I
asked him if he had not beautiful thoughts, but he said, not in wi