A little after midnight on the morning of June 21, 1908, a Shrewton cock began to crow, and that trumpet sound, which I never hear without a stirring of the blood, on account of old associations, informed me that the late moon had risen or was about to rise, linking the midsummer evening and morning twilights, and I set off to Stonehenge.  It was a fine still night, without a cloud in the pale, dusky blue sky, thinly sprinkled with stars, and the crescent moon coming up above the horizon.  After the cock ceased crowing a tawny owl began to hoot, and the long tremulous mellow sound followed me for some distance from the village, and then there was perfect silence, broken occasionally by the tinkling bells of a little company of cyclists speeding past towards “The Stones.”  I was in no hurry:  I only wished I had started sooner to enjoy Salisbury Plain at its best time, when all the things which offend the lover of nature are invisible and nonexistent.  Later, when the first light began to appear in the east before two o’clock, it was no false dawn, but insensibly grew brighter and spread further, until touches of colour, very delicate, palest amber, then tender yellow and rose and purple, began to show.  I felt then as we invariably feel on such occasions, when some special motive has called us forth in time to witness this heavenly change, as of a new creation—­

          The miracle of diuturnity
          Whose instancy unbeds the lark,

that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it were wasted days!

O that unbedding of the lark!  The world that was so still before now all at once had a sound; not a single song and not in one place, but a sound composed of a thousand individual sounds, rising out of the dark earth at a distance on my right hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens—­a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like the voices of earthly beings.  They were not human nor angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and glory of the morning.

It was but eight minutes past two o’clock when this “unbedding of the lark” began, and the heavenly music lasted about fourteen minutes, then died down to silence, to recommence about half an hour later.  At first I wondered why the sound was at a distance from the road on my right hand and not on my left hand as well.  Then I remembered what I had seen on that side, how the “boys” at play on Sundays and in fact every day hunt the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only conclude that the lark has been pretty well wiped out from all that part of the plain over which the soldiers range.