ledge, it may be, was wont to see the sky darkened 

 by flying reptiles. 



They were fashioned roughly, these boulders, 

 cast in a rude mould, as if they had emerged 

 from chaos itself before form had become defined. 

 The sea would have all the pebbles on its shore 

 of a size and shape. It takes a block from the 

 cliff and turns it in its lathe that it may become a 

 polished sphere, as in that larger and cosmic lathe 

 the planets are turned. On the beach are innu- 

 merable stones that look as much alike as so many 

 eggs. But no two pasture stones are the same. 

 They were turned in no such precise lathe as the 

 sea's, but by a rough-handed force, which here 

 planed a surface and there gouged a depression. 

 Pasture stones are thus almost as individual in 

 appearance as men. Here is one squat like a toad, 

 one humpbacked as a dromedary, another flat as a 

 cake — a mere slab of granite. They are wrinkled 

 and deformed, as so many gnomes, and covered 

 with excrescences — razor-backed or rovmd-shoul- 

 dered, lopsided or with protruding paunch, while 

 the great solitary boulders rise from the pasture, 

 massive domes and pinnacles of granite. 



But none are polished, none are symmetrical; 

 132 



