was that in the condition of the heath itself which resembled
protracted and halting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose
appertaining to the scene. This was not the repose of actual
stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness. A
condition of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death
is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness of the
desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers akin to those of
the meadow, and even of the forest, awakened in those who thought of
it the attentiveness usually engendered by understatement and reserve.


The scene before the reddleman's eyes was a gradual series of ascents
from the level of the road backward into the heart of the heath. It
embraced hillocks, pits, ridges, acclivities, one behind the other,
till all was finished by a high hill cutting against the still light
sky. The traveller's eye hovered about these things for a time, and
finally settled upon one noteworthy object up there. It was a barrow.
This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the
loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained.
Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean
brow, its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this
heathery world.

As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware that its
summit, hitherto the highest object in the whole prospect round, was
surmounted by something higher. It rose from the semi-globular mound
like a spike from a helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative
stranger might have been to suppose it the person of one of the Celts
who built the barrow, so far had all of modern date withdrawn from the
scene. It seemed a sort of last man among them, musing for a moment