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.