The workmen in that bitter wind were decidedly better off than
the gentlemen from Burlington House in charge of the
excavations. These stood with coats buttoned up and hands
thrust deep down in their pockets. It seemed to me that
it was better to sit in the shelter of the wall and watch the
birds than to burrow in the crumbling dust for that small
harvest. Yet I could understand and even appreciate their
work, although it is probable that the glow I experienced was
in part reflected. Perhaps my mental attitude, when standing
in that sheltered place, and when getting on to the windy wall
I looked down on the workers and their work, was merely
benevolent. I had pleasure in their pleasure, and a vague
desire for a better understanding, a closer alliance and
harmony. It was the desire that we might all see nature--the
globe with all it contains--as one harmonious whole, not as
groups of things, or phenomena, unrelated, cast there by
chance or by careless or contemptuous gods. This dust of past
ages, dug out of a wheat-field, with its fragments of men's
work--its pottery and tiles and stones--this is a part, too,
even as the small birds, with their little motives and
passions, so like man's, are a part. I thought with self
shame of my own sins in this connection; then, considering
the lesser faults on the other side, I wished that Mr. St.
John Hope would experience a like softening mood and regret
that he had abused the ivy. It grieves me to hear it called a
"noxious weed." That perished people, whose remains in this
land so deeply interest him, were the mightiest "builders of
ruins" the world has known; but who except the archaeologist
would wish to see these piled stones in their naked harshness,
striking the mind with dismay at the thought of Time and its