our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy
of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's
eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
fellow-archaeologists, because I saw they were all much more interested
in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a
distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly
entertaining them.

Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from the date of the
erection of the long barrow, and a new race had come to occupy the soil
of England, and had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,
yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were a pastoral and
agricultural people, these new comers, acquainted with the use and abuse
of bronze, and far more civilised in every way than their darker
predecessors. No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce
onslaught the Celtic invaders--for the bronze-age folk were presumably
Celts--swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of
the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and
serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long
years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,
just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more
primitive neighbour.

We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and
found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or
otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse
hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not
by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the
long barrow. A pretty pattern ran round its edge--a pattern in the
simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted
merely of the print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the
moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early
pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by
the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we
discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful
wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no
consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated
both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to
the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (w