find large
numbers of these circles, but if you visit the spots where they are
supposed to be, you will find that many have vanished. The "Merry
Maidens," not far from the "Pipers," still remain--nineteen great
stones, which fairy-lore perhaps supposes to have been once fair
maidens who danced to the tune the pipers played ere a Celtic Medusa
gazed at them and turned them into stone. Every one knows the story of
the Rollright stones, a similar stone circle in Oxfordshire, which
were once upon a time a king and his army, and were converted into
stone by a witch who cast a fatal spell upon them by the words--

Move no more; stand fast, stone;
King of England thou shalt none.

The solitary stone is the ambitious monarch who was told by an oracle
that if he could see Long Compton he would be king of England; the
circle is his army, and the five "Whispering Knights" are five of his
chieftains, who were hatching a plot against him when the magic spell
was uttered. Local legends have sometimes helped to preserve these
stones. The farmers around Rollright say that if these stones are
removed from the spot they will never rest, but make mischief till
they are restored. There is a well-known cromlech at Stanton Drew, in
Somerset, and there are several in Scotland, the Channel Islands, and
Brittany. Some sacrilegious persons transported a cromlech from the
Channel Islands, and set it up at Park Place, Henley-on-Thames. Such
an act of antiquarian barbarism happily has few imitators.

Stonehenge, with its well-wrought stones and gigantic trilitha, is one
of the latest of the stone circles, and was doubtless made in the Iron
Age, about two hundred years before the Christian era. Antiquarians
have been very anxious about its safety. In 1900 one of the great
upright stones fell, bringing down the cross-piece with it, and
several learned societies have been invited by the owner, Sir Edmund
Antrobus, to furnish recommendations as to the best means of
preserving this unique memorial of an early race. We are glad to know
that all that can be done will be done to keep Stonehenge safe for
future generations.

We need not record the existence of dolmens, or table-stones, the
remains of burial mounds, which have been washed away by denudation,
nor of what the French folk call _alignements_, or lines of stones,
which have suffered like other megalithic monuments. Barrows or tumuli
are still plentiful, great mounds of earth