CHAPTER XI.

Walk to the Clent Hills. Incident in a Fruit Shop. - St. Kenelm's Chapel. Legend of St. Kenelm. - Ancient Village of Clent; its Appearance and Character. View from the Clent Hills. - Mr. Thomas Moss.-Geologic Peculiarities of the Landscape; Illustration. - The Scotch Drift. Boulders; these transported by the Agency of Ice Floes. Evidence of the Former Existence of a broad Ocean Channel. - The Geography of the Geologist. - Aspect of the Earth ever Changing. — Geography of the Palæozoic Period; of the Secondary; of the Tertiary. - Ocean the great Agent of Change and Dilapidation.

LET us now return to Hales Owen, and thence pass on to the Clent Hills, - famous resorts, in those parts, of many a summer pic-nic party from the nearer villages, and of pale-faced artizans and over-labored clerks, broken loose for a few happy days from the din and smoke of the more distant Birmingham. I was fortunate in a pleasant day, - rather of the warmest for walking along the low, dusty roads, but sufficiently cool and breezy on the grassy slopes of the hills. A humble fruit-shop stood temptingly open among the naileries in the outer skirts of Hales Owen, and I stepped in to purchase a few pears: a sixpenceworth would have been by no means an overstock in Scotland to one who had to travel several miles up hill in a warm day; and so I asked for no less here. The fruitman began to fill a capacious oaken measure, much like what, in Scotland, we would term a meal lippy, and to pile up the fruit over it in a heap. "How much is that?" I asked. "Why, only fivepenn'orth," replied the man; "but I'll give thee the other penn'orth arter."-"No, no, stop," said I; "give me just

the half of fivepenn'orth; you are much more liberal here than the fruit-dealers in my country; and I find the half will be quite as much as I can manage." The incident reminded me

of the one so good-humoredly related by Franklin. When fresh from Boston, where food was comparatively high, he went into a baker's shop in Philadelphia to purchase threepence worth of bread on which to breakfast, and received, to his astonishment, for the money, three huge loaves, two of which he had to carry through the streets stuck under his arms, while satiating his hunger to the full on the third.

When little more than a mile out of town, I struck off the high road through a green lane, flanked on both sides by extensive half-grown woods, and overhung by shaggy hedges, that were none the less picturesque from their having been long strangers to the shears, and much enveloped in climbing, berrybearing plants, honeysuckles, brambles, and the woody nightshade. As the path winds up the acclivity, the scene assumes an air of neglected wildness, not very common in England: the tangled thickets rise in irregular groups in the foreground; and, closing in the prospect behind, I could see through the frequent openings the green summits of the Clent Hills, now scarce half-a-mile away. I was on historic ground, the "various wild," according to Shenstone, "for Kenelm's fate renowned;" and which, at a still earlier period, had formed one of the battle-fields on which the naked Briton contended on unequal terms with the mail-enveloped Roman. Half-way up the ascent, at a turning in the lane, where the thicket opens into a grassy glade, there stands a fine old chapel of dark red sandstone, erected in the times of the Heptarchy, to mark the locale of a tragedy characteristic of the time, the murder of the boy-king St. Kenelm, at the instigation of his sister Kendrida. I spent some time in tracing the half-obliterated carv

ings on the squat Saxon door-way, by far the most ancient part of the edifice, and in straining hard to find some approximation to the human figure in the rude effigy of a child sculptured on the wall, with a crown on its head and a book in its hand, intended, say the antiquaries, to represent the murdered prince, but at present not particularly like anything. The story of Kenelm we find indicated, rather than told, in one of Shenstone's elegies:

"Fast by the centre of yon various wild,

Where spreading oaks embower a Gothic fane,
Kendrida's arts a brother's youth beguiled;
There Nature urged her tenderest pleas in vain.
Soft o'er his birth, and o'er his infant hours,
The ambitious maid could every care employ;
And with assiduous fondness crop the flowers,
To deck the cradle of the princely boy.

"But soon the bosom's pleasing calm is flown;
Love fires her breast; the sultry passions rise;
A favored lover seeks the Mercian throne,

And views her Kenelm with a rival's eyes.
See, garnished for the chase, the fraudful maid
To these lone hills direct his devious way:
The youth, all prone, the sister-guide obeyed;

Ill-fated youth! himself the destined prey."

The minuter details of the incident, as given by William of Malmesbury and Matthew of Westminster, though admirably fitted for the purpose of the true ballad-maker, are of a kind which would hardly have suited the somewhat lumbrous dignity of Shenstone's elegiacs. Poor Kenelm, at the time of his death, was but nine years old. His murderer, the favored lover of his sister, after making all sure by cutting off his head with a long-bladed knife, had buried head, knife, and body, under a bush in a "low pasture" in the forest, and the earth

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concealed its dead. The deed, however, had scarce been perpetrated, when a white dove came flying into old St. Peters, at Rome, a full thousand miles away, bearing a scroll in its bill, and, dropping the scroll on the high altar, straightway disappeared. And on the scroll there was found inscribed in Saxon characters the following couplet:

"In Clent, in Caubage, Kenelm, kinge-born,

Lyeth under a thorne, his hede off shorne."

So marvellous an intimation, miraculous, among its other particulars, in the fact, that rhyme of such angelic origin should be so very bad, though this part of the miracle the monks seem to have missed, - was, of course, not to be slighted. The Churchmen of Mercia were instructed by the pontiff to make diligent search after the body of the slain prince; and priests, monks and canons, with the Bishop of Mercia at their head, proceeded forthwith in long processior. to the forest. And there, in what Milton, in telling the story, terms a "mead of kine," they found a cow lowing pitifully beside what seemed to be a newly-laid sod. The earth was removed, the body of the murdered prince discovered, the bells of the neighboring churches straightway began "to rongen a peale without mannes helpe;" and a beautiful spring of water, the resort of many a pilgrim for full seven centuries after, burst out of the excavated hollow. The chapel was erected immediately beside the well; and such was the odor of sanctity which embalmed the memory of St. Kenelm, that there was no saint in the calendar on whose day it was more unsafe to do anything useful. There is a furrow still to be seen, scarce half a mile to the north of the chapel, from which a team of oxen, kept impiously at work during the festival of the saint, ran away, and were never after heard of; and the

owner lost not only his cattle, but, shortly after, his eyes to boot. The chapel received gifts in silver, and gifts in gold,"crouns," and "ceptres," and "chalysses: " there grew up around it, mainly through the resort of pilgrims, a hamlet, which, in the times of Edward the First, contained a numerous population, and to which Henry the Third granted an annual fair. At length the age of the Reformation arrived; Henry the Eighth seized on the gold and silver; Bishop Latimer broke down the well; the pilgrimages ceased; the hamlet disappeared; the fair, after lingering on till the year 1784, disappeared also; and St. Kenelm's, save that the ancient chapel still survived, became exactly such a scene of wild woodland solitude as it had been ere the boy-prince fell under the knife of the assassin. The drama of a thousand years was over when, some time about the close of the last century, a few workmen, engaged in excavating the foundations of the ruined monastery of Winchcomb, in which, according to the monkish chroniclers, the body of the young prince had been interred near that of his father, lighted on a little stone coffin, beside a larger, which lay immediately under the great eastern window of the church. They raised the lid. There rested within, a little dust, a few fragments of the more solid bones, a half-grown human skull tolerably entire, and beside the whole; and occupying half the length of the little coffin, lay a long-bladed knife, converted into a brittle oxide, which fell in pieces in the attempt to remove it. The portion of the story that owed its existence to the monks had passed into a little sun-gilt vapor; but here was there evidence corroborative of its truthful nucleus surviving still.

I reached the nearest summit in the Clent range, and found it an oblong grassy level, many acres in extent, bounded on the right by a secluded valley that opens among the hills,