If, as a wise man
has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall
down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs,
the relics of their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic and
impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues
left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be
pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with
its unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again,
and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not in
jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such
catastrophe--sentimental philosophy for the 'enlightened' few, and
fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as
heathen ones) for the masses.--At that you may only too probably
arrive--unless you repent, and 'get back your souls.'
* * * * *
We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of
the real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey
Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we
sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred
feet in air above the western main.
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