been taken, and she had secretly and
unobserved torn off a piece of the bed-curtain.
Enquiries were made, suspicion fell on Wild
Darell of Littlecot, and stern men came searching
the old house. Darell was seized, but the
judge was bribed, and the proof was insufficient.
The murderer escaped the sword of justice. But
Heaven, however, he could not escape; for
he soon afterwards fell, while leaping a stone
stile in hunting—still cailed "Darell's death
place"—and broke his neck.

Over the downs outside Marlborough, the
crow skims for a moment to Badbury camp,
alights with a sidelong waft to pick up a
stray tradition. It was in this great double ring
of ditch and rampart, with a fifty foot fall and
an area of two thousand feet, that the Britons
held out for a whole day against the Saxons.
At sunset, the Saxons, with a last tremendous
rush, stormed the camp, and, crashing in with
their axes, conquered the last British stronghold
in Wiltshire.

The crow now drifts into Marlborough, that
quiet scholastic town, so sheltered by the great
bluffs of chalk that gird it round. That handsome
red brick building, now the college, has
quite a history of its own. The central part of
it is a fragment of the "Great House" built by
Sir Francis Seymour, a grandson of the
Protector, who was created Baron Seymour, by
Charles the First, during the Rebellion; for
Marlborough was a royal town, and had its rubs
in those times. In 1643, Sir Neville Poole seized
the great house, and held it with his men
in buff, for the parliament. The year before,
Wilmot had stormed and burnt the town,
and sent John Franklin, the popular member,
and several of the leading townsmen,
prisoners to Oxford. In 1644, Charles himself
came and held his quarters at Marlborough
Castle. In Queen Anne's time the Earl and
Countess of Hertford kept house here, and
entertained many of the great writers. Pope,
bitter and invalided, came here and wrote
verses, and Thomson of the Seasons was staying
here while he wrote his Spring. The other
sections of his great composite poems were
written at Richmond and in London.

A tradition of the old posting days still
lingers in Marlborough. In 1767, the year
before the great Earl of Chatham, stricken down
by age and infirmities, resigned his place in the
cabinet, the great orator, seized with gout on
the road to London, was compelled to remain
at the Castle Inn at Marlborough. Wilkes
tells us of his eagle eye, the fascination of
his glance, and the unquenchable fire in his
glowing words. The haughty and imperious
old statesman remained shut up in his room
here for many weeks, and we picture to
ourselves the proud old man with the attributes
Wilkes describes, terribly testy at the delay,
and chafing at the vexatious disease, and the
fuss of over-servile landlords and over-zealous
country Ollapods. Although so proud that he
never transacted business but in grand official
costume, it was not the first time the earl had
given audiences in bed. During this visit,
which must have set Marlborough talking,
everybody who travelled on the great west
road was astonished to find the town
overflowing with footmen and grooms in the earl's
livery. What a retinue! It was fit for a king.
The fact was, it was only a trick of the old
proud earl, who insisted that during his stay
every waiter, stable boy, and odd man at the
Castle Inn, should wear his livery.

Beyond Marlborough, across the downs are
the great Druidic temple of Avebury, the Devil's
Den, and the mysterious artificial hill of Silbury.
Avebury, the centre of all Druidic tradition,
is older than even Stonehenge. At Avebury
there are twenty-eight acres covered by Celtic
graves, and huge Druidic stones. From the
adjacent hill you see them strewing the ground
everywhere, like flocks of sheep; and in the
distance down the last ridge of the downs, towards
Bowood and Savernake Forest, runs the waving
line of the Wansdyke, the old rampart frontier
of the Belgæ. In 1740 two avenues of two
miles in length led to the central Avebury circle
of one hundred unhewn stones, enclosing two
more double concentric circles. They were then
supposed to be emblems of the serpent, which
was a symbol of the sun. Six hundred of these
stones have been destroyed, built up in walls,
and hedges, and cottages. Only about a dozen
now remain in their old places. The old church
of Avebury stands near these relics of a
forgotten superstition, and triumphs over their
decay.

Theorists in Indian Celtic mythology have
gone stark-staring mad about these stone
circles, older than Stonehenge. "A temple of
the sun, obvious to the meanest capacity," cries
one. "Temple of the sun be hanged, learned
idiot," writes another; "this is a Druid cathedral,
a patriarchal temple built ages before the
mere stone-rings of Cornwall, the hallowed
altars of Dartmoor, or the processional avenues
of Britany." "Incompetent blockhead," screams
a third. "Why, Silbury Hill was the Druid's
Ararat, and these stones are emblems of Noah's
Ark and the patriarchal altars!" But the
strangest winged hippogriff of a hobby-horse
that ever trod Cloudland is ridden by Mr. Duke,
who contends that Wiltshire was treated by the
Druids as the ground plan of a vast planetarium
or astronomical map. These same Druids, who
worshipped the god of thunder and adored the
oak and the mistletoe, laid out the whole
range of downs in planetary regions, in which
the sun and planets were represented on a
meridional line from north to south—a position
from which the ancients believed the planets
had started at the beginning and would return
at the end of the world, when they had run their
course. The earth itself was represented by
Silbury Hill; the sun and moon by the great
circles of Avebury, Avebury being a
Phoenician word for "the mighty ones." The
ecliptic by the avenues, or the Serpent. Venus
by a stone circle at Winterbourne Basset;
Mercury by Walker's Hill; Mars by an earth-
work at Marden, in the Vale of Pewsey; Jupiter
by Casterley Camp on the edge of Salisbury