This grew worse and worse, until towards the middle of the month of June, A.D. 1611, his mind was altogether much above the proper temperature. Great things were pending in the heavens, which might be quoted as pious excuse for a little human restlessness. The prince, with his implements always ready either in his lantern-chamber, or at his favourite spot of the hills, according to the weather, grew more and more impatient daily for the sun to be out of the way, and more and more intolerant every night of any cloudiness. Self-perplexed, downcast, and moody (except when for a few brief hours a brighter canopy changed his gloom into a nervous rapture), he wasted and waned away in body, as his mind grew brighter. After the hurried night, he dragged his faint way home in the morning, and his face of exhausted power struck awe into the household. No one dared to ask him what had happened, or why he looked so; and he like a true philosopher kept all explanations to himself. And then he started anew, and strode with his Samian cloak around him, over the highest, darkest, and most lonesome hill, out of people’s sight. One place there was which beyond all others suited his purposes and his mood. A well-known land-mark now, and the scene of many a merry picnic, Chanctonbury Ring was then a lonely spot imbued with terror of a wandering ghost,--an ancient ghost with a long white beard walking even in the afternoon, with its head bowed down in search of something--a vain search of centuries. This long-sought treasure has now been found; not by the ghost, however, but a lucky stroke of the ploughshare; and the spectral owner roves no more. He is supposed, with all the assumption required to make a certainty, to have been a tenant on Chancton Manor, under Earl Gurth, the brother of Harold, and being slain at Hastings, to have forgotten where his treasure lay.