llars of stone, as a judgment
on their own wickedness, and a warning to all their companions as well.

Having to choose between the antiquarian hypothesis and the popular
legend on the very spot to which both referred, a common susceptibility
to the charms of romance at once determined us to pin our faith on the
legend. Looking at the Hurlers, therefore, in the peculiar spirit of the
story attached to them, as really and truly petrified ball-players, we
observed, with great interest, that some of them must have been a little
above, and others a little below our own height, in their lifetime; that
some must have been very corpulent, and others very thin persons; that
one of them, having a protuberance on his head remarkably like a
night-cap in stone, was possibly a sluggard as well as a
Sabbath-breaker, and might have got out of his bed just in time to
"hurl;" that another, with some faint resemblance left of a fat grinning
human face, leaned considerably out of the perpendicular, and was, in
all probability, a hurler of intemperate habits. At some distance off we
remarked a high stone standing entirely by itself, which, in the absence
of any positive information on the subject, we presumed to consider as
the petrified effigy of a tall man who ran after the ball. In the
opposite direction other stones were dotted about irregularly, which we
could only imagine to represent certain misguided wretches who had
attended as spectators of the sports, and had therefore incurred the
same penalty as the hurlers themselves. These humble results of
observations taken on the spot, may possibly be useful, as tending to
offer some startling facts from ancient history to the next pious layman
in the legislature who gets up to propose the next series of Sabbath
prohibitions for the benefit of the profane laymen in the nation.

Abandoning any more minute observation of the Hurlers than that already
recorded, in order to husband the little time still left to us, we soon
shaped our course again in the direction of the Cheese-Wring. We arrived
at the base of the hill on which it stands, in a short time and without
any difficulty; and beheld above us a perfect chaos of rocks piled up
the entire surface of the eminence. All the granite we had seen before
was as nothing compared with the granite we now looked on. The masses
were at one place heaped up in great irregular cairns--at another,
scattered confusedly over the ground; poured all along