HAD heard about him before I saw him, and, naturally, I had expected to find a being as nearly resembling a Titan as these latter days of the nineteenth century could produce.
It is true, the fact that he was to be addressed as "Mr. Judd" had come upon me with a slight sense of shock in the first place, because I had hoped that his patronymic might have a smack of Celtic origin. One couldn't imagine an ancestral Judd having existed in the days of the Druids, and, therefore, one was obliged to experience and recover from a certain disappointment. I did recover from it, however, and I made up my mind to a Mr. Judd. He was to be an enormously tall, muscular Mr. Judd, with his loins girt about with shaggy skins, and a rough mane of hair blowing in the wild winds which beset Stonehenge. He was to carry a club, too, and very closely resemble the agreeably primitive gentleman one sometimes sees on advertisements of Bovril.
All these things I had carefully pictured to myself before driving out to Stonehenge. What I saw afterwards was this:
It was a gloomy day. (Or do great dusky clouds, like huge, hovering birds, ever brood thus darkly over the mysterious monument of the past, no matter what may be the weather elsewhere?) Against the most majestic of all the remaining plinths leaned a bright-eyed, intelligent-faced, grey-haired, healthily ruddy man, of middle age, and somewhat under middle height.
Not far from where he stood grazed a white horse—a philosophic-looking beast—while from behind a pillar of rock protruded the impertinent shafts of an extremely modern photographic van.
The one human denizen of the spot (beside myself) looked at me, and said nothing. I did not look much at him, for 1 was glancing impatiently about for my formidable ideal of Stonehenge's guardian.
At last I said, in despair of having my wish gratified, "I beg your pardon. Do you happen to be able to inform me where I can find the guardian of Stonehenge? For I hear it has a guardian!"
"That's true, it has," he returned, his brown eyes twinkling. "And yet you wouldn't think, to look at it, it was under age, now would you? Though you might call it a case of 'second childhood,' perhaps."
Then he remembered that I had asked another question. "You want to see the guardian, you say?"
"To see him, and have a little chat with him," I returned.
"Well, you're doing both at this moment. My name is Judd, and I 've been guardian of Stonehenge for five-and-twenty years."
Alas, my Titan had exploded! Here was only a crystallised bit of him! However, Mr. Judd looked a man who might be able to use both fist and brain, if necessary, in the protection of his overgrown ward.
"I suppose you are wondering what Stonehenge wants of a guardian at all," said Mr. Judd. "But you see, it it's like this. If I were not continually about, the stones would be covered with cuttings and names, and bits of them would be taken away for souvenirs. It's bad enough as it is, but I'm glad to say that not one of the wilful defacements you see has been done in the last quarter of a century. Another of my duties is to keep people from scattering their papers and orange-peel and egg-shells about, and to drive stray cattle away."
"Surely no one would be such a Vandal as to desecrate the site of so magnificent a monument as this!"