I felt then as we invariably feel on such occasions, when some special motive has called us forth in time to witness this heavenly change, as of a new creation-- The miracle of diuturnity Whose instancy unbeds the lark, that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it were wasted days! O that unbedding of the lark! The world that was so still before now all at once had a sound; not a single song and not in one place, but a sound composed of a thousand individual sounds, rising out of the dark earth at a distance on my right hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens--a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like the voices of earthly beings.

They were not human nor angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and glory of the morning.
It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding of the lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about fourteen minutes, then died down to silence, to recommence about half an hour later.

At first I wondered why the sound was at a distance from the road on my right hand and not on my left hand as well.

Then I remembered what I had seen on that side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day hunt the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only conclude that the lark has been pretty well wiped out from all that part of the plain over which the soldiers range.
At Stonehenge I found a good number of watchers, about a couple of hundred, already assembled, but more were coming in continually, and a mile or so of the road to Amesbury visible from "The Stones" had at times the appearance of a ribbon of fire from the lamps of this continuous stream of coming cyclists.

Altogether about five to six hundred persons gathered at "The Stones," mostly young men on bicycles who came from all the Wiltshire towns within easy distance, from Salisbury to Bath.