Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless driving, and for endeavouring to take too much of the road; but the lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this description was correct, the matter dropped. XXX And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like, offers an insoluble riddle to archæologists of all the ages. No one, despite the affected archaisms and the [Sidenote: _STONEHENGE_] [Illustration: THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’ ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).] sham archæology, has described Stonehenge so impressively as that ‘wondrous boy’ Chatterton:-- A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes, Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie, It ne could be the worke of human handes, It ne was reared up by menne of claie. Here did the Britons adoration paye To the false god whom they did Tauran name, Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie, Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame; Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee, As they were met in council for to bee.