Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are." How came the stones here, for these sarsens or
Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood? The sacrificial
stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can
resist the action of fire, and, as I read in the books, must have been
brought one hundred and fifty miles.

On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's hammer
and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of
granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer
elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on
another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a well-wrought
tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The
chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on
so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to
learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of
objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits,
while it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of
the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the
accurate history it will yet eliminate.



MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines."
Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a few miles below Windsor.]