196 THE EXETER ROAD 



too much of the road ; but the lawyers found a flaw 

 in the indictment, which stated that he was driving 

 three o-eldinos and a mare, and as it could not be 

 proved that this description was correct, the matter 

 dropped. 



XXX 



And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up 

 the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches. 

 Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful 

 thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, 

 or can come upon the place at dead of night either 

 by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless 

 midnight, you will fail to be impressed ; unless you 

 are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, 

 not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices 

 offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the 

 last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the 

 place has an immediate human interest which other- 

 wise it lacks in the immeasurably vast space of time 

 dividing us from the period of its building and of 

 the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make 

 a wide circle round it on the Plain. Solitary, with 

 nothing to give it scale, even the brakes that convey 

 irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on 

 the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this 

 Mystery, sphinx-like, offers an insoluble riddle to 

 archaeologists of all the ages. 



No one, despite the affected archaisms and the 



