the
sundew, clearing the glutinous stamens of the flies that have been
caught by them, and calling in a tone like the warning note of
the nightingale. Sleeping on the surface the carp lies, and will
not be scared save by a stone thrown into the still water in which
it dreams away its life.

The sandy elevations are golden with tormintilla; a richer gold is
that which lies below, where the marsh glows with bog asphodel.
The flowering rush spreads its pale pink blossoms; a deeper crimson
is the marsh orchis showing its spires among the drooping clusters
of the waxy-pink, cross-leaved heath, and the green or pale and
rosy-tinted bog-mosses.

Near Pudmoor Pool stands a gray block of ironstone, a solitary
portion of the superincumbent bed that has been washed away. It
resembles a gigantic anvil, and it goes by the name of Thor's
Stone. The slopes that dip towards it are the Thor's-lea, and give
their name to the parish that includes it and them.

At one time there was a similar mass of iron at the summit of
Borough Hill, that looks down upon the morasses.

To this many went who were in trouble or necessity, and knocking
on the stone made known their requirements to the Pucksies, and
it was asserted, and generally believed, that such applicants had
not gone away unanswered, nor unrelieved.

It was told of a certain woman who one evening sought to be freed
by this means from the husband who had made her life unendurable,
that that same night--so ran the tale--he was returning from the
tavern, drunk, and stumbling over the edge of a quarry fell and
broke his neck. Thereupon certain high moralists and busybodies
had the mass of stone broken up and carted away to mend the roads,
with the expectation thereby of putting an end to what they were
pleased to term "a degrading superstition."

To some extent the destruction of the Wishing Block did check the
practice. But there continued to be persons in distress, and women
plagued with drunken husbands, and men afflicted with scolding
wives. And when the pilgrimage of such to Borough Hill ceased,
because of the destruction of the stone on it, then was it diverted,
and the current flowed instead to Thor's Stone--a stone that had
long been regarded with awe, and which now became an object of
resort, as it was held to have acquired the merits of the block
so wantonly demolished on Borough Hill.

Nevertheless, the object of the high moralists and busybodies was
partially attain