thing.  Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken.  Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one’s prowling warily.  Hard by, almost within a stone’s-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva—­the Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in uncovering these dozen years or longer.  The stone walls, too, like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and brambles and ivy.  The trees have grown upon the wall, sending roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls but it brings down huge masses of masonry with it.  This slow levelling process has been going on for centuries, and it was doubtless in this way that the buildings within the walls were pulled down long ages ago.  Then the action of the earth-worms began, and floors and foundations, with fallen stones and tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once a city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn.  Finally the wood was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field —­so far as we know, the ground has been cultivated since the days of King John.  But the entire history of this green walled space before me—­less than twenty centuries in duration—­does not seem so very long compared with that of the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to prehistoric times.

Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the “coloured shade” of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall fluttering to the ground, thinking in an aimless way of the remains of the two ancient cities before me, the British and the Roman, and of their comparative antiquity, I am struck with the thought that the sweet sensations produced in me by the scene differ in character from the feeling I have had in other solitary places.  The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our pleasure in nature.  Here it seems good to know, or to imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the people who occupied this spot in the remote past—­Iberian and Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane.  If that hard-featured and sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I should say (mentally):  This