Page:A Literary Pilgrim in England.djvu/123

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JOHN AUBREY
97

to be buried. What with the family estates in Herefordshire and Breconshire, he was bound to be a traveller. Much of his time, says he, was spent journeying to South Wales and Herefordshire. In the end litigation lost him everything but his friends, yet he still loved travelling. The homeless man wished that the monasteries had not been put down; it was fit that there should be "receptacles and provision for contemplative men." "What a pleasure 'twould have been," he exclaimed, "to have travelled from monastery to monastery!" He was crossed often in love, too. But even Joan Sumner, one of his least propitious ladies, led him to another part of Wiltshire, to Seend, near Melksham, where he discovered chalybeate springs. If it had not been for the jealousy of the Bath doctors, he thought he might have made the place another Bath. Even so, the village could not contain the company visiting the springs, and building was afoot.

Thus with all his misfortunes it was a happy life to look back on, sketching antiquities on horseback; spying "Our Lady's Church steeple at Sarum like a fine Spanish needle" when he topped Red Horn Hill above Urchfont; seeing the distant mountains of Devon gleaming white with May snow, while where he stood at Llanrechid in Glamorganshire scarce any had fallen; and, above all, suddenly discovering the grey wethers—the grey stones scattered sheep-like over the slopes—on Marlborough Downs, and the great temple of Avebury. The grey wethers were then much thicker than now over the downs between Marlborough and Avebury, and looked like the scene "where the giants fought with huge stones against the gods, as is described