animals are children of Nature, like them living and seeking our
subsistence under her sky, familiar with her sun and wind and rain.

If some ostentatious person had come to this strangely quiet spot and
raised a staring, big house, the sight of it in the landscape would have
made it impossible to have such a feeling as I have described--this
sense of man's harmony and oneness with nature. From how much of England
has this expression which nature has for the spirit, which is so much
more to us than beauty of scenery, been blotted out! This quiet spot in
Wiltshire has been inhabited from of old, how far back in time the
barrows raised by an ancient, barbarous people are there to tell us, and
to show us how long it is possible for the race of men, in all stages of
culture, to exist on the earth without spoiling it.

One afternoon when walking on Bishop Down I noticed at a distance of a
hundred yards or more that a rabbit had started making a burrow in a new
place and had thrown out a vast quantity of earth. Going to the spot to
see what kind of chalk or soil he was digging so deeply in, I found that
he had thrown out a human thigh-bone and a rib or two. They were of a
reddish-white colour and had been embedded in a hard mixture of chalk
and red earth. The following day I went again, and there were more
bones, and every day after that the number increased until it seemed to
me that he had brought out the entire skeleton, minus the skull, which I
had been curious to see. Then the bones disappeared. The man who looked
after the game had seen them, and recognizing that they were human
remains had judiciously taken them away to destroy or stow them away in
some safe place. For if the village constable had discovered them, or
heard of their presence, he would perhaps have made a fuss and even
thought it necessary to communicate with the coroner of the district.
Such things occasionally happen, even in Wiltshire where the chalk hills