The visitor to Salisbury Plain sees around him a lonely waste, utterly barren except for a few recently planted trees, and otherwise as desolate as it could have been when Hengist and Horsa landed in Britain, for its monotony is still unbroken except by the funeral mounds of ancient chiefs, which dot it to its horizon, and contrast strangely with the crowded life and fertile soil which everywhere surrounds its borders. In the midst of this loneliness rise the rude, enormous monoliths of Stonehenge, circles of gray stones which seem as old as time, and were there, as we now are told, the temple of a people which had already passed away, and whose worship was forgotten, when our Saxon forefathers first saw the place.

In the center of the inner circle is a stone which is believed once to have been the alter, while beyond the outmost ring, quite away to the north-east upon the open plain, still stands a solitary stone, set up there evidently with some special object by the same unknown builders. Seen under ordinary circumstances, it is difficult to divine its connection with the others; but we are told that once in each year, upon the morning of the longest day, the level shadow of this distant, isolated stone is projected at sunrise to the very center of the ancient sanctuary, and falls just upon the alter.