HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
SUCCESSORS TO HENRY COLBURN,

13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.

1861.

The right of Translation is reserved.

THESE STUDIES FROM LIFE," NOW ENLARGED AND REVISED,

APPEARED ORIGINALLY IN CHAMBERS' JOURNAL.

ODLE

AN

STUDIES FROM LIFE.

Old Stones.

"NONSENSE! Who on earth would take such a journey,"-it was forty miles across country, or sixty odd if you went round by rail-"just to see a heap of old stones!"

So grumbled our host, whose "bark was waur than his bite," who always said the unkindest things and did the kindest. Of course we never fretted ourselves about the matter; we knew we should go.

It had been the dream of youth to us all, indulged hopelessly for well, I had better not say how many years; since, though to the youngest-now our merry hostess, and mother of our

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host's three boys-time did not so much matter, we two elders, who had not made quite such good use of it, might possibly be sensitive on the subject. Time? Pshaw! we plucked the old fellow by the beard and laughed at him, all three of us. He had only made us wiser, and richer, and merrier; we did not grudge him one year out of the many that have slipped away since we used to sit in short frocks and frilled trousers and long plaited tails of hair-poring over Penny Magazines and juvenile Tours through England -which confirmed us, as I said, in the longing to see Stonehenge, of all places in the worldOur "world"; which then, in wildest dreams, extended not beyond the British Islands.

We never had seen it: not though, since then, some of us had gone up and down Europe, till we had come to talk of the Alps and Italy with a hand-in-glove familiarity quite appalling; though to others the "ends of the world" had at secondhand been brought so close that the marvellous Peter Botte mountain, about which we drank in so many (ahem!) fabulosities in the said Penny Magazine, and Cape Horn, of gloomy horror, and the delicious Pacific Islands, on which we so

desperately longed to be cast away as youthful Robinson Crusoes, had dwindled into every-day things. Yet still, still we had never seen Stonehenge.

As the idea was started, and we canvassed it over the tea-table, the dream of our girlhood revived; with all the delicious mystery and ingenious conjectures that attended it, and the wild hope-struck out of the infinite belief of youth in everything, and, above all, in itself that if we only once got a sight of it, who knew but that we, actually we might be the happy individual to set for ever at rest, by some lucky suggestion, the momentous question, Who built Stonehenge ?

A "heap of old stones!" We scouted the phrase with even youthful indignation; we protested that it had been the desire of our lives, that we would any of us cheerfully travel anyhow, anywhen, anywhere to see Stonehenge. Then, like wise women, we let the matter rest; we knew we should go.

Our plan germinated a day or so in wholesome silence, till we saw its first leaf peering above ground in the shape of a Bradshaw which, quite par hasard, our host was apparently studying.