One incident of our excursion to Stonehenge had a significance for me which renders it memorable in my personal experience.  As we drove over the barren plain, one of the party suddenly exclaimed, “Look!  Look!  See the lark rising!” I looked up with the rest.  There was the bright blue sky, but not a speck upon it which my eyes could distinguish.  Again, one called out, “Hark!  Hark!  Hear him singing!” I listened, but not a sound reached my ear.  Was it strange that I felt a momentary pang? Those that look out at the windows are darkened, and all the daughters of music are brought low. Was I never to see or hear the soaring songster at Heaven’s gate,—­unless,—­unless,—­if our mild humanized theology promises truly, I may perhaps hereafter listen to him singing far down beneath me?  For in whatever world I may find myself, I hope I shall always love our poor little spheroid, so long my home, which some kind angel may point out to me as a gilded globule swimming in the sunlight far away.  After walking the streets of pure gold in the New Jerusalem, might not one like a short vacation, to visit the well-remembered green fields and flowery meadows?  I had a very sweet emotion of self-pity, which took the sting out of my painful discovery that the orchestra of my pleasing life-entertainment was unstringing its instruments, and the lights were being extinguished,—­that the show was almost over.  All this I kept to myself, of course, except so far as I whispered it to the unseen presence which we all feel is in sympathy with us, and which, as it seemed to my fancy, was looking into my eyes, and through them into my soul, with the tender, tearful smile of a mother who for the first time gently presses back the longing lips of her as yet unweaned infant.

On our way back from Stonehenge we stopped and took a cup of tea with a friend of our host, Mr. Nightingale.  His house, a bachelor establishment, was very attractive to us by the beauty within and around it.  His collection of “china,” as Pope and old-fashioned people call all sorts of earthenware, excited the enthusiasm of our host, whose admiration of some rare pieces in the collection was so great that it would have run into envy in a less generous nature.

It is very delightful to find one’s self in one of these English country residences.  The house is commonly old, and has a history.  It is oftentimes itself a record, like that old farmhouse my friend John Bellows wrote to me about, which chronicled half a dozen reigns by various architectural marks as exactly as if it had been an official register.  “The stately homes of England,” as we see them at Wilton and Longford Castle, are not more admirable in their splendors than “the blessed homes of England” in their modest beauty.  Everywhere one may see here old parsonages by the side of ivy-mantled churches, and the comfortable mansions where generations of country squires have lived in peace, while their sons have gone forth to fight England’s battles, and carry her flags of war and commerce all over the world.  We in America can hardly be said to have such a possession as a family home.  We encamp,—­not under canvas, but in fabrics of wood or more lasting materials, which are pulled down after a brief occupancy by the builders, and possibly their children, or are modernized so that the former dwellers in them would never recognize their old habitations.