These mysterious monuments, which in the day of the Venerable Bede were no less remarkable than Stonehenge, have been ravaged by time, but some sixty of them--their magic baffles an exact count--remain. Grey Druid semblances, heathen to the core, owl-faced, monkey-faced, they stand in a great, ragged circle, enclosing a clump of firs. Deeply sunken in the ground, they are of uneven height; some barely peep above the surface; the tallest rises more than seven feet; some lie prone; some bend sideways; all have an aspect of extreme antiquity, a perforated, worm-eaten look the reverse of prepossessing. But our visit was ill-timed. If we had had the hardihood to climb up to that wind-swept waste at midnight, we should have seen those crouching goblins spring erect, join hands and gambol around in an ungainly ring, trampling down the thistles and shocking every church spire in sight. At midnight of All Saints they make a mad rush down the hillside for their annual drink of water at a spring below. The antiquaries who hold that these strange stones were erected not as a Druid temple, nor as memorials of victory, nor for the election and inauguration of primitive kings, but for sepulchral purposes, rest their case largely on the Whispering Knights. This third group is made up of five stones which apparently once formed a cromlech and may have been originally covered with a mound. They are some quarter of a mile behind the circle,--a bad quarter of a mile I found it as I struggled across the rugged moor knee-deep in rank clover and other withering weeds. Just before me would fly up partridges with a startled whirr, hovering so near in their bewilderment that I could almost have knocked a few of them down with my parasol, if that had appealed to me as a pleasant and friendly thing to do. For this was a "cover," destined to give a few of Blake's and Shelley's countrymen some autumn hours of brutalising sport. "Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain doth tear. A skylark wounded in the wing; A cherubim doth cease to sing." The Five Knights lean close together, yet without touching, enchanted to stone in the very act of whispering treason against their ambitious chief. They whisper still under the elder tree, and often will a lass labouring in the barley fields slip away from her companions at dusk to beg the Five Knights to whisper her an answer to the question of her heart. I walked back, having hit on a path, in company with a rustic harvester, whose conversation was confined to telling me five times over, in the stubborn, half-scared tone of superstition, that while the other elders are laden with white berries, this elder always bears red; and the collie wagged his tail, and the donkey wagged his ears, in solemn confirmation.