All made out of the carver’s brain....

It is not that they see the blasphemy of it like that of Babel or of the Titans. But they know that the builders of Babel and the Titans will fail, and if they cannot beat them themselves they will be on the side of the one who can. I should myself be sorry to see a house—such a one as is likely to be built—on that island between Gramp’s and Hackpen hills. But if it were such a house as Morgan’s Folly! I warmed with the thought of transporting that hill-top tower to this peninsulated table of turf, by the expenditure of a sum sufficient to have given a free library to Letcombe Bassett.

I do not know if it was called a Folly, but there was a plantation at the cross-road from Sparsholt to Lambourn which I liked—a long, narrow plantation of beeches close together alongside the cross-road and touching the Ridgeway on one side; on the other was a tumulus. Here it was a broad road with no hedges, there being corn on the right, and sheep, enclosed by a wire fencing, on the left. It was now near its highest point, nearly eight hundred feet, at the Hill Barn that stands with its company of stacks amidst a group of ash trees above Sparsholt. The purple meadow crane’s-bill was growing beside the road near Hill Barn.

I left the Ridgeway that morning by the Blowingstone Hill and its woods, and went to Sparsholt, which has a quarter-mile of chestnut and lime, and then beech and elm shadow on the road to its church. One bee was buzzing inside as I walked over the stones and brasses of the floor and looked at the Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the royal arms, on the wall, but chiefly at three recumbent stone effigies lying asleep and private within a chapel, guarded by stone lions, railings, and a locked gate.

CHAPTER X
EIGHTH DAY—SPARSHOLT TO TOTTERDOWN, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY WHITE HORSE HILL AND WAYLAND’S SMITHY

I was going through Sparsholt the next day just after the children had gone into school after their mid-morning play. The road was quieter than the church on that hot, bright morning. As I walked under the garden trees I came slowly within hearing of a melody played so lightly, or so far lost among winds or leaves, that I could hardly distinguish it. It was an hour when nearly everyone is at work. A poor, ragged girl was walking in front of me in awkward haste. But she stopped at the same time as I did, to listen. The music was not everything. The shadow and the filtered light, the silence of the music half submerged, the busy hour so steeped in tranquillity, helped the player to express perfect carelessness and freedom from the conditions of life—summer, wealth, luxury, happiness, youth, gaiety, innocence, and benevolence. They expressed it for us, as that river-side garden picture at Watlington doubtless expressed it for others. But presently the player lighted upon a melody which took me right away from Sparsholt and the summer morning and the tranquillity. I could not catch every note, but even the fragmentary skeleton of “Caradoc’s Hunt” could not be mistaken. At a first hearing this old hunting song seemed to be much the same thing as Scott’s

Waken, lords and ladies gay,

and little more than the north countryman’s

One morning last winter to Holm Bank there came