n which
captives were bound with twisted osiers, and burnt to death for a
Druidical sacrifice. The thing is grotesque, vile, horrible; the very
stones of the place seemed soaked with terror, cruelty and death. Even
recently foul and barbarous traditions were practised there, it is
said, by villagers, who were Christian only in name. Yet it lay
peacefully enough to-day, the shadows of the clouds racing over it, the
wind rustling in the grass, with nothing to break the silence but the
twitter of birds, the bleat of sheep on the down, and the crying of
cocks in the straw-thatched village below.

What a strange fabric of history, memory, and tradition is here
unrolled, of old unhappy far-off things! How bewildering to think of
the horrible agonies of fear, the helpless, stupefied creatures lying
bound there, the smoke sweeping over them and the flames crackling
nearer, while their victorious foes laughed and exulted round them, and
the priests performed the last hideous rites. And all the while God
watched the slow march of days from the silent heaven, and worked out
his mysterious purposes! And yet, surveying the quiet valley to-day,
it seems as though there were no memory of suffering or sorrow in it at
all.

We climbed the down; and there at our feet the world lay like a map,
with its fields, woods, hamlets and church-towers, the great rich plain
rolling to the horizon, till it was lost in haze. How infinitely
minute and unimportant seemed one's own life, one's own thoughts, the
schemes of one tiny moving atom on the broad back of the hills. And
yet my own small restless identity is almost the only thing in the
world of which I am assured!

There came to me at that moment a thrill of the spirit which comes but
rarely; a deep hope, the sense of a secret lying very near, if one
could only grasp it; an assurance that we are safe and secure in the
hand of God, and a certainty that there is a vast reality behind,
veiled from us only by the shadows of fears, ambitions, and desires.
And the thought, too, came that all the tiny human beings that move
about their tasks in the plain beneath--nay, the animals, the trees,
the flowers, every blade of grass, every pebble--each has its place in
the great and awful mystery. Then came the sense of the vast
fellowship of created things, the tender Fatherhood of the God who made
us all. I can hardly put the thought into words; but it was one of
those sudden intuitions that se