Hannah More, who was born in 1745, wrote a large number of stories chiefly of a religious character, and was said to have earned L30,000 by her writings, amongst them a religious tract bearing the title of “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.”  We found he was not a mythical being, for David Saunders, the shepherd referred to, was a real character, noted for his homely wisdom and practical piety, and, as Mrs. More described him, was quite a Christian Hero.  He resided at Great Cherwell, near Lavington, where his house was still pointed out to visitors.  A typical shepherd of Salisbury Plain was afterwards pictured by another lady, and described as “wearing a long black cloak falling from neck to heels, a round felt hat, like a Hermes cap without the wings to it, and sometimes a blue milk-wort or a yellow hawk-weed in the brim, and walking with his plume-tailed dog in front leading his sheep, as was customary in the East and as described in the Scriptures—­“the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.”

We did not see one answering to that description as we crossed the Plain, but no doubt there were such shepherds to be found.

The sky had been overcast that day, and it was gloomy and cloudy when we reached Stonehenge.  Without a house or human being in sight, the utter loneliness of the situation seemed to add to our feelings of wonder and awe, as we gazed upon these gigantic stones, the remains of prehistoric ages in England.  We had passed through the circles of stones known as the “Standing Stones of Stenness” when we were crossing the mainland of the Orkney Islands on our way to John o’ Groat’s, but the stones we now saw before us were much larger.  There had been two circles of stones at Stonehenge, one inside the other, and there was a stone that was supposed to have been the sacrificial stone, with a narrow channel in it to carry off the blood of the human victims slain by the Druids.  In that desolate solitude we could almost imagine we could see the priests as they had been described, robed in white, with oak crowns on their heads, and the egg of a mythical serpent round their necks; we could hear the cries and groans of the victims as they were offered up in sacrifice to the serpent, and to Bel (the sun).  Tacitus said they held it right to stain their altars with the blood of prisoners taken in war, and to seek to know the mind of the gods from the fibres of human victims.  One very large stone outside the circles was called the “Friar’s Heel,” the legend stating that when the devil was busy erecting Stonehenge he made the observation to himself that no one would ever know how it had been done.  This remark was overheard by a friar who was hiding amongst the stones, and he replied in the Wiltshire dialect, “That’s more than thee can tell,” at which the devil took up a big stone to throw at him, but he ran away as fast as he could, so that the stone only just grazed his heel, at the place where it now stands.