This paganism of England, he might have reflected as he made his way slowly from stone to stone, pausing before each and finding in each the same monotonous and uncommunicative austerity, this early English paganism, how bleakly different it was from the paganism of the South! Indeed, he might wonder whether to call his forebear pagan, which had a rich full-blooded sound, or, stripping him of garlands, to call him simply heathen. Here, in this flint country of the small northern island, no flowers and fruit had surrounded the sacrifice, no cymbals clashed, no grapes and plaited maize wreathed the horns of the victim, no songs accompanied the priest. A stone, a knife, and blood, red and grey, sufficed their ritual. This was no country to see nymphs in the streams and oaks, to hear the flute of a satyr in the beechwood. Yet there was a harsher dignity, beside which the Southern paganism was soft and ample, over-ripe with sweetness. It was a creed which would not concern itself with the fruits of earth; Demeter was not for it, nor lecherous Pan, nor a god clothed in the plumes of a swan. It would concern itself with nothing lower than the most majestic of human contemplations, the sun and the stars in their courses, so that after the lapse of centuries the upright stones still aspired to celestial communion when the gentle or the angry dawn broke over the rounded Atlantean shoulders of the Downs. Clare Warrener rode idly along the leafy lane, her pony’s hoofs raising little grey puffs of dust. Nothing in particular occupied her mind, beyond the sight which she was going to see, and which for weeks now she had been anticipating. She had promised herself that she would ride on this day up on to the Downs, cast her eye over the festivity, and ride on again, with perhaps a slight resentment at this invasion of the hills; a resentment she knew to be absurd, since the rustic youths and girls at their celebrating had a better right to the hills than she had herself, they who were the descendants of shepherds and farmers, wresting for centuries a living from the poor stony soil. She loved in the hills their spaciousness, and their refusal to yield to tillage; at most they would grant pasture to the sheep crawling on their slopes, but for the rest they remained eternally, in the heart of an amenable and complacent island, the untamed spot--they, and the moorlands, and the hills of Wales and the North.