re
what is called saccharine (that is, sugary) sandstone. If you chip
off a bit, you find it exactly like fine whity-brown sugar, only
intensely hard. Now these stones have become very famous; for two
reasons. First, the old Druids used them to build their temples.
Second, it is a most puzzling question where they came from.

First. They were used to build Druid temples.

If you go to the further lodge of Dogmersfield Park, which opens
close to the Barley-mow Inn, you will see there several of them,
about five feet high each, set up on end. They run in a line
through the plantation past the lodge, along the park palings; one
or two are in an adjoining field. They are the remains of a double
line; an avenue of stones, which has formed part of an ancient
British temple.

I know no more than that: of that I am certain.

But if you go to the Chalk Downs of Wiltshire, you see these temples
in their true grandeur. You have all heard of Stonehenge on
Salisbury Plain. Some of you may have heard of the great Druid
temple at Abury in Wilts, which, were it not all but destroyed,
would be even grander than Stonehenge. These are made of this same
sugar-sandstone.

But where did the sandstone come from? You may say, it "grew" of
itself in our sands and gravels; but it certainly did not "grow" on
the top of a bare chalk down. The Druids must have brought the
stones thither, then, from neighbouring gravel-pits. They brought
them, no doubt: but not from gravel-pits. The stones are found
loose on the downs on the top of the bare chalk, in places where
they plainly have not been put by man.

For instance, near Marlborough is a long valley in the chalk, which,
for perhaps half a mile, is full of huge blocks of this sandstone,
lying about on the turf. The "gray wethers" the shepherds call
them. One look at them would show you that no man's hand had put
them there. They look like a river of stone, if I may so speak; as
if some mighty flood had rolled them along down the valley, and
there left them behind as it sunk.

Now, whence did they come?

Many answers have been given to that question. It was supposed by
many learned men that they had been brought from the sandstone
mountains of Wales, like the rolled pebbles of which I spoke just
now. But the answer to that was, that these great stones are not
rolled: they are all squarish, more or less; their edges are often
sharp and fresh, instead of being polished a