[Afoot in England by W.H. Hudson]@TWC D-Link bookAfoot in England CHAPTER Twenty-One: Stonehenge 13/16
I had a few good minutes at the ancient temple when the sight of the rude upright stones looking black against the moonlit and star-sprinkled sky produced an unexpected feeling in me: but the mood could not last; the crowd was too big and noisy, and the noises they made too suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace. At three o'clock a ribbon of slate-grey cloud appeared above the eastern horizon, and broadened by degrees, and pretty soon made it evident that the sun would be hidden at its rising at a quarter to four.
The crowd, however, was not down-hearted; it sang and shouted; and by and by, just outside the barbed-wire enclosure a rabbit was unearthed, and about three hundred young men with shrieks of excitement set about its capture.
It was a lively scene, a general scrimmage, in which everyone was trying to capture an elusive football with ears and legs to it, which went darting and spinning about hither and thither among the multitudinous legs, until earth compassionately opened and swallowed poor distracted bunny up.
It was but little better inside the enclosure, where the big fallen stones behind the altar-stone, in the middle, on which the first rays of sun would fall, were taken possession of by a crowd of young men who sat and stood packed together like guillemots on a rock.
These too, cheated by that rising cloud of the spectacle they had come so far to see, wanted to have a little fun, and began to be very obstreperous.
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