Now It Came To Pass That One Year During His
Childhood A Crane, Owing To Some Accident, Came Down To The
Ground Near His Home.
The whole population of the village
turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and were amazed at its
size; it was, he said, the strangest sight he had ever looked
on.
How big was it? I asked him; was it as big as an
ostrich? An ostrich, he said, was nothing to it; I might as
well ask him how it compared with a lapwing. He could give me
no measurements: it happened when he was a child; he had
forgotten the exact size, but he had seen it with his own eyes
and he could see it now in his mind - the biggest bird in the
world. Very well, I said, if he could see it plainly in his
mind he could give some rough idea of the wing-spread - how
much would it measure from tip to tip? He said it was perhaps
fifty yards - perhaps a good deal more!
A similar trick was played by my mind about Stonehenge. As
a child I had stood in imagination before it, gazing up
awestruck on those stupendous stones or climbing and crawling
like a small beetle on them. And what at last did I see with
my physical eyes? Walking over the downs, miscalled a plain,
anticipating something tremendous, I finally got away from the
woods at Amesbury and spied the thing I sought before me far
away on the slope of a green down, and stood still and then
sat down in pure astonishment.
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