Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/412

ÆT. 46] fishing, "I think that is best. I am writing to Mrs. Comely to say positively that we will; so begone dull care: don't forget the worms." Another letter gives a description of his arrival with Webb at Kelmscott through the floods of that wet August. They had been at Salisbury, and he had seen Stonehenge for the first time. "I was much impressed by it," he wrote: "though the earth and sky nearly met, and the rain poured continuously, nothing could spoil the great stretches of the Plain, and the mysterious monument that nobody knows anything about—except Fergusson who knows less than nothing." From Amesbury they drove north across the Wiltshire downs.

"We went right up the Avon valley, and very beautiful it was; then, as the river narrowed, we turned off towards a little scrubby town called Pewsey that lies in the valley between the Salisbury and the Marlborough downs: it was all very fine and characteristic country, especially where we had to climb the Marlborough downs at a place that I remembered coming on as a boy with wonder and pleasure: Oare Hill they call it. We got early in the afternoon to Marlborough and walked out to see the College, and so strolled away to the Devil's Den, and back in the dusk. The next morning we set out early for Avebury, in weather at first much like the day before; however it cleared before we reached Silbury, and was quite fine while we were thereabout for two hours, after which we drove on towards Swindon, intending Lechlade and Kelmscott that evening. The downs end at a village called Wroughton, and we could see a large piece of England from the slope of it, Faringdon clump not at all in the background. We got another trap at Swindon, where they warned us that we should