is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil’s Punch Bowl very many times magnified,—­and spies, far away and far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom.  This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage.  Here a very pretty little bird comedy was in progress:  a pair of stock-doves which had been taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just escaped from the large cage where they had always lived, and all the family were excitedly engaged in trying to recapture them.  They were delightful to see—­those two pretty blue birds with red legs running busily about on the green lawn, eagerly searching for something to eat and finding nothing.  They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he liked, but they refused to be touched or taken; they were too happy in their new freedom, running and flying about in that brilliant sunshine, and when I left towards the evening they were still at large.

But before quitting that small isolated village in its green basin—­a human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in England—­I wished the hours I spent in it had been days, so much was there to see and hear.  There was the gibbet on the hill, for example, far up on the rim of the green basin, four hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial, that symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years and generations? and why had it been raised so high—­was it because the crime of the person put to death there was of so monstrous a nature that it was determined to suspend him, if not on a gibbet fifty cubits high, at all events higher above the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite?  The gruesome story is as follows.

Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe, with two sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm in the village.  She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at Woodhay, a carrier who used to go on two or three days each week with his cart to deliver parcels at Coombe.  But he was a married man, and as he could not marry the widow while his wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire brain that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and to this course the widow probably consented.  Accordingly, one day, he invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his journey to the remote village, and on the way he got her out of the cart and led her into a close thicket to show her something he had discovered there.  What he wished to show her (according to one version of the story) was a populous hornets’ nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated hornets to sting her to death.  That night he slept at