Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/213

Rh as if the lower skies exhaled them, as they do the earth's invisible vapours. But we listened to them from this serene height with wonder that sounds of such small projectile force could ascend so high. The rippling, rollicking voices of children in far-off villages blended and floated up to us in that cheery music of young human life that is so delightful. Then we heard the silvery murmur of church bells striking the hour but could not tell whence it came or whither it went. It came like a pulse of sound that had touched every golden ray of the sun's setting light in heaven, and set it agoing like a harp-string. Then listening to this and that, as to the happy music of human spheres, a gander full five miles away spoke up in a brassy, peevish ejaculation, as if jealous for his order and determined to let the upper world know that other bipeds than man walked the earth and looked erect on heaven. Indeed. I think some of the tongues we heard must have uttered their voices in Shrewsbury, or in villages ten miles distant.

The point which we found most favourable for observation was not the very crown of the hill, but a little lower down on the western side, or the "Bladder Stone," a term which must have been intended to convey the German idea of a sausage, or of one made of turnip and liver. The rock presents not only these colours, but the chopped-