Those who say that Stonehenge will remain a monument to all time speak without a knowledge of the facts. In reality the larger stones are disintegrating; slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely. They are weather-worn, and some of them very decrepit. Frosts have chipped and cracked them, and other extremes of climate have found out the soft places in the sandstone. Also, modern facilities for reaching such out-of-the-way spots as this used to be have brought so many visitors of all kinds here that, in one way and another Stonehenge is bound to suffer. It is now the proper thing for every one who visits Stonehenge to be photographed by the photographer who sits there for that purpose all day long and every day; and although there is no occasion for such insane fury, the picnic parties generally contrive to smash beer and lemonade bottles against the stones until the turf is thickly strewn with broken glass. Modernity also likes to range itself beside the unfathomably ancient, and so when the Automobile Club visited Stonehenge, on Easter Saturday 1899, all the cars and their occupants were photographed beside the stones, to mark so historic an occasion. XXXI Away beyond Stonehenge stretches Salisbury Plain, in future to be vulgarised by military camps and manœuvres, and to become an Aldershot on a larger scale, but hitherto a solitude as sublime in its own way as Dartmoor and Exmoor. Dickens gives us his meed of appreciation of this wild country, and finds the boundless prairies of America tame by comparison. ‘Now,’ he says, writing when on his visit to America, ‘a prairie is undoubtedly worth seeing, but more that one may say one _has_ seen it, than for any sublimity it possesses in itself.... You stand upon the prairie and see the unbroken horizon all round you. You are on a great plain, which is like a sea without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary, but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its characteristic ... to say that the sight is a [Sidenote: _SALISBURY PLAIN_] [Illustration: ANCIENT AND MODERN: MOTOR CARS AT STONEHENGE, EASTER 1899.] landmark in one’s existence, and awakens a new set of sensations, is sheer gammon. I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie--go to Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive; and Salisbury Plain is _decidedly_ more so.’