released when
the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.
Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all
clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,
the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order
that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts
whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to
merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet
in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,
and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in
form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and
encloses it, so does the round barrow answer in form to the urn
containing the calcined ashes of the cremated barbarian. And is it not a
suggestive fact that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church
below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, as
opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of the soul, once more
bringing us back to the small oblong mound which is after all but the
dwarfed and humbler modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is
the connection between that familiar shape and the practice of
inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere to have come into
use again throughout all Europe, after whole centuries of continued
cremation, as the natural concomitant and necessary mark of Christian
burial.

This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at Ogbury Barrows.
But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself instead to psychological
research, and said nothing.

FISH OUT OF WATER

Strolling one day in what is euphemistically termed, in equatorial
latitudes, 'the cool of the evening,' along a tangled tropical American
field-path, through a low region of lagoons and watercourses, my
attention happened to be momentarily attracted from the monotonous
pursuit of the nimble mosquito by a small animal scuttling along
irregularly before me, as if in a great hurry to get out of my way
before I could turn him into an excellent specimen. At first sight I
took the little hopper, in the grey dusk, for one of the common, small
green lizards, and wasn't much disposed to pay it any distinguished
share either of perso