Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks,
which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman
soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the
most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled
with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so
closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking
sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long
sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to
lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet
wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun
shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the
shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they
illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which
they made their way. A considerable open space, in the midst of
this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites
of Druidical superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so
regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a
circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood
upright; the rest had been dislodged from their places, probably
by the zeal of some convert to Christianity, and lay, some
prostrate near their former site, and others on the side of the
hill. One large stone only had found its way to the bottom, and
in stopping the course of a small brook, which glided smoothly
round the foot of the eminence, gave, by its opposition, a feeble
voice of murmur to the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet.

The human figures which completed this landscape, were in number
two, partaking, in their dress and appearance, of that wild and
rustic character, which belonged to the woodlands of the
West-Riding of Yorkshire at that early period. The eldest of