ny more young and pretty,
whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for
information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with
the prettiest and pleasantest among the archaeological sisters, whose
acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and
then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the
protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull
paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house
volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish
church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and
tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be
found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to
him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or
other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of
Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a
correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon
somebody's lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much
laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'hote dinner
at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and
urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an
archaeological association.

It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury
Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the
subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been
the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin
and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me,
and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological
research into the habits and manners