soft rock without in the course of thousands of years, producing caves and grottoes and underground galleries and all the wonders of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, with its stalactite pillars and fairy avenues and domes—­though the Cotswold caves are naturally on a much smaller scale.  At Torquay and on the Mendip Hills, as everybody knows, there are caves of wondrous beauty, carved by the water within the living rock.

Probably within a hundred yards of Bibury spring there are beautiful hidden caves, such as those funny little “palaeolithic” men lived in a few thousand years ago; but why there have not been more discoveries of this nature in this part of the Cotswolds it is difficult to say.  There is a cave hereabouts, men say, but the entrance to it cannot now be found.  There is likewise a Roman villa on the hill here which has not yet been dug out of its earthy bed.  A hundred years ago a large number of Roman antiquities were discovered near this village.

We now leave Bibury behind us, and a mile on we pass through the hamlet of Ablington, which is very like Bibury on a smaller scale, with its ancient cottages, tithe barns and manor house; its springs of transparent water, its brook, and wealth of fine old trees.  We have no time to linger in this hamlet to-day, though we would fain pause to admire the old house.

     “The pillar’d porch, elaborately embossed;
        The low, wide windows with their mullions old;
      The cornice richly fretted of grey stone;
        And that smooth slope from which the dwelling rose
      By beds and banks Arcadian of gay flowers,
        And flowering shrubs, protected and adorned.”

      WORDSWORTH

After leaving Ablington we once more ascend the hill and make our way along an old, disused road, probably an ancient British track, in preference to keeping to the highway—­in the first place because it is by far the shortest, and secondly because we intend to go somewhat out of our way to inspect two ancient barrows, the resting-place of the chiefs of old, of whom Ossian (or was it Macpherson?)[5] sang:  “If fall I must in the field, raise high my grave.  Grey stones and heaped-up earth shall mark me to future times.  When the hunter shall sit by the mound and produce his food at noon, ‘Some warrior rests here,’ he will say; and my fame shall live in his praise.”

[Footnote 5:  In spite of Dr. Johnson and other eminent critics, one cannot help believing in the genuineness of some of the poems attributed to Ossian.  “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”; and those wonderful old songs are too wild and lifelike to have had their origin in the eighteenth century.  Macpherson doubtless enlarged upon the originals, but he must have had a good foundation to work upon.]