ned the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we
expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung
for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.
Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big
Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the
house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of
its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I
stood for the first moment within that primaeval palace of the dead,
never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy
archaeologist.

The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried
cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the
barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the
central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and
then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still
encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves are quite
modern and commonplace personages compared with the short, squat
chieftains of the long barrows. For all the indications we found in the
long barrow at Ogbury (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us
at once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance, the
skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the newer stone-age in
Britain.

The only weapons or implements we could discover in the barrow were two
neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very delicate ground greenstone
hatchet, or tomahawk. These were the weapons of the dead chief, laid
beside him in the stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his
future use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude
hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for the ghost, had
also been placed close to his side: but they had mouldered away with
time and damp, till it was quite impossible to recover more than a few
broken and shapeless fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:
whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had known at all the
art