alone by the side of the spring.

It was a bright, sunshiny day; a pure air was abroad; nothing sounded
audibly but the singing of birds at some distance, and the rustling of
the few leaves that clothed one or two young trees in a neighbouring
garden. Unoccupied though I was, the minutes passed away as quickly and
as unheeded with me, as with my companion who was busily engaged in
sketching. The ruins of the ancient Oratory, viewed amid the pastoral
repose of all things around them, began imperceptibly to exert over me
that mysterious power of mingling the impressions of the present with
the memories of the past, which all ruins possess. While I sat looking
idly into the water of the well, and thinking of the groups that had
gathered round it in years long gone by, recollections began to rise
vividly on my mind of other ruins that I had seen in other countries,
with friends, some scattered, some gone now--of pleasant pilgrimages, in
boyish days, along the storied shores of Baiae, or through the desolate
streets of the Dead City under Vesuvius--of happy sketching excursions
to the aqueducts on the plains of Rome, or to the temples and villas of
Tivoli; during which, I had first learned to appreciate the beauties of
Nature under guidance which, in this world, I can never resume; and had
seen the lovely prospects of Italian landscape pictured by a hand now
powerless in death. Remembrances such as these, of pleasures which
remembrance only can recall as they were, made time fly fast for me by
the brink of the holy well. I could have sat there all day, and should
not have felt, at night, that the day had been ill spent.

But the sunlight began to warn us that noon was long past. We had some
distance yet to walk, and many things more to see. Shortly after my
friend had completed his sketch, therefore, we reluctantly left St.
Clare's Well, and went on our way briskly, up the little valley, and out
again on the wide surface of the moor.

It was now our object to steer a course over the wide plain around us,
leading directly to the "Cheese-Wring" rocks (so called from their
supposed resemblance to a Cornish cheese-press or "_wring_"). On our
road to this curiosity, about a mile and a half from St. Clare's Well,
we stopped to look at one of the most perfect and remarkable of the
ancient British monuments in Cornwall. It is called Trevethey Stone, and
consists of six large upright slabs of granite, overlaid by a seventh,
which