lty, tends
to remove it conveniently into a category to which it does not belong,
still more prone is the pedantic mind to remove it out of existence
altogether. So 'wiped out' is the theory; and upon it a sympathetic
imagination can invent what sorrowful pictures it will of departing
legions, the last little cloud of dust down the highway, the lovers by
the gate watching it, not comprehending; the peaceful homestead in the
background, ripe for doom--and what-not.

Or, stay! There is another theory to which the late Professor Freeman
inclined (if so sturdy a figure could be said to incline), laying stress
on a passage in Gildas, that the Romans in Britain, faced by the Saxon
invader, got together their money, and bolted away into Gaul. 'The Romans
that were in Britain gathered together their gold-hoard, hid part in the
ground and carried the rest over to Gaul,' writes Gildas. 'The hiding in
the ground,' says Freeman, 'is of course a guess to explain the frequent
finding of Roman coins'--which indeed it _does_ explain better than the
guess that they were carried away, and perhaps better than the
schoolboy's suggestion that during their occupation of Britain the Romans
spent most of their time in dropping money about. Likely enough, large
numbers of the colonists did gather up what they could and flee before
the approaching storm; but by no means all, I think. For (since, where
all is uncertain, we must reason from what is probable of human nature)
in the first place men with large estates do not behave in that way
before a danger which creeps upon them little by little, as this Saxon
danger did. These colonists could not dig up their fields and carry them
over to Gaul. They did not keep banking accounts; and in the course of
four hundred years their main wealth had certainly been sunk in the land.
They could not carry away their villas. We know that many of them did not
carry away the _tessellae_ for which (as we have seen) they had so
peculiar a veneration; for these remain. Secondly, if the colonists left
Britain in a mass, when in the middle of the sixth century we find
Belisarius offering the Goths to trade Britain for Sicily, as being 'much
larger and this long time subservient to Roman rule,'[2] we must suppose
either (as Freeman appears to suppose) that Belisarius did not know what
he was offering, or that he was attempting a gigantic 'bluff,' or lastly
that he really was offering an exchange not flatly derisory; o