 heart of the heath. It embraced
hillocks, pits, ridges, acclivities, one behind the other, till all was finished
by a high hill cutting against the still light sky. The traveller's eye hovered
about these things for a time, and finally settled upon one noteworthy object up
there. It was a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above its natural level
occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained.
Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its
actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.
    As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware that its summit,
hitherto the highest object in the whole prospect round, was surmounted by
something higher. It rose from the semi-globular mound like a spike from a
helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative stranger might have been to suppose
it the person of one of the Celts who built the barrow, so far had all of modern
date withdrawn from the scene. It seemed a sort of last man among them, musing
for a moment before dropping into eternal night with the rest of his race.
    There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath. Above the plain rose
the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure.
Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial
globe.
    Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure give to the
dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obvious justification of their
outline. Without it, there was the dome without the lantern; with it the
architectural demands of the mass were satisfied. The scene was strangely
homogeneous, in that the vale, the upland, the barrow, and the figure above it
amounted only to unity. Looking at this or that member of the group was not
observing a complete thing, but a fraction of a thing.
    The form was so much like an organic part of the entire motionless structure
that to see it move would have impressed the mind as a strange phenomenon.
Immobility being the chief characteristic of that whole which the person formed
portion of, the discontinuance of immobility in any quarter suggested confusion.
    Yet that is what happened. The figure perceptibly gave up its fixity,
shifted a step or two, and turned round. As if alarmed, it descended on the
right side of the barrow, with the glide of a water-drop down a bud, and then
vanished. The movement had been sufficient to show more clearly the
characteristics of the
