On the highest point of the Forest of Dean district--just one thousand feet above ocean's level--is a singular mass of rock known as the "Buckstone." An inverted pyramid, with base some fifteen feet in diameter, poised upon its apex, which rests on another rock mass of quadrangular shape as upon a plinth. Into this the down-turned apex seems indented so far as to make the apparent surface of contact but a few square feet. In reality the two masses are detached, the superimposed one so loose as to have obtained the character of a "rocking stone." Many the attempt to rock it; many the party of tourists who had laid shoulders against it to stir it from its equilibrium; not a few taking departure from the place fully convinced they had felt, or seen it, move. And many the legend belonging thereto, Druidical and demoniac; some assigning it an artificial, others a supernatural, origin. Alas for these romantic conjectures! the geologist gives them neither credence nor mercy. Letting the light of science upon the Buckstone, he shows how it comes to be there; by the most natural of causes--simply through the disintegration of a soft band of the old red sandstone interposed between strata of its harder conglomerate. From beside this curious eccentricity of the weather-wearing forces is obtained one of the finest views of all England, or rather a series of them, forming a circular panorama. Turn what way one will the eye encounters landscape as lovely as it is varied. To the east, south-east, and south can be seen the far-spreading champaign country of Gloucester, Somerset, and Devon, here and there diversified by bold, isolated prominences, as the Cotswolds and Mendips, with a noble stream, the Severn, winding snake-like along, and gradually growing wider, till in funnel-shape it espouses the sea, taking to itself the title of Channel. From the shores of this, stretching away northward, but west from the Buckstone, is a country altogether different. No plains in that direction worth the name, but hills and undulating ridges, rolling up higher and higher as they recede, at length ending in a mountain background, blue black, with a horizontal line which shows many a curious _col_ and summit. The greater portion of this view is occupied by the shire of Monmouth, its foreground being the valley of the Wye, where this river, after running the gauntlet between English Bicknor and the Dowards, comes out surging and foam-crested as a victorious warrior with his plumes still unshorn. And as he in peaceful times might lay them aside, so the fretted and writhing river, clot after clot, casts off its snowlike froth, and, seemingly appeased, flows in tranquil current through the narrow strip of meadow land on which stands the miniature city of Monmouth.