mer, and flows again after the autumn rains, "when
the springs rise" in the chalk hills. While here, I rambled on the downs
and haunted "The Stones." The road from Shrewton to Amesbury, a straight
white band lying across a green country, passes within a few yards
of Stonehenge: on the right side of this narrow line the land is all
private property, but on the left side and as far as one can see it
mostly belongs to the War Office and is dotted over with camps. I
roamed about freely enough on both sides, sometimes spending hours at
a stretch, not only on Government land but "within bounds," for the
pleasure of spying on the military from a hiding-place in some pine
grove or furze patch. I was seldom challenged, and the sentinels I came
across were very mild-mannered men; they never ordered me away; they
only said, or hinted, that the place I was in was not supposed to be
free to the public.

I come across many persons who lament the recent great change on
Salisbury Plain. It is hateful to them; the sight of the camp and troops
marching and drilling, of men in khaki scattered about everywhere over
a hundred square leagues of plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting
booming of guns. It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land
has been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them. I was
pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.

It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the fox--a
semi-sacred animal with them--is that, if you chance to see one crossing
your path in the morning, all that comes before your vision on that day
will be illusion. As an illustration of this belief it is related that
a Japanese who witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes and the
earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others, thinking the
end of the world had come, were swooning with extreme fear, viewed it
without a tremor as a very sublime but illusory spectacle. For on that
very morning he had seen a fox cross his path.

A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have what
may be called a sense of historical time--a consciousness of the
transitoriness of most things human--if we see institutions and works
as the branches on a pine or larch, which fail and die and fall away
successively while the tree itself lives for ever, and if we measure
their duration not by our own few swift years, but by the li