ner a woman--the Countess of Buchan--whose
frightful crime consisted in having assisted at the coronation of her
liege sovereign, Robert the Bruce. In the construction of the Edinburgh
and Glasgow Railway the line was driven, with annihilating effect,
through the centre of the old and rich Roman Station on the Wall of
Antoninus at Castlecary. Some years ago, as I passed along the line, I
saw the farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of this station busily
removing a harmless wall,--among the last, if not the very last remnants
of Roman masonry in Scotland. The largest stone circle near the English
Border--the Stonehenge or Avebury of the north of England--formerly
stood near Shap. The stone avenues leading to it are said to have been
nearly two miles in length. The engineer of the Carlisle and Lancaster
railway carried his line right through the very centre of the ancient
stone circle forming the head of the chief avenue, leaving a few of its
huge stones standing out on the western side, where they may be still
seen by the passing traveller about half a mile south of the Shap
station. If the line had been laid only a few feet on either side, the
wanton desecration and destruction of this fine archaic monument might
have been readily saved. Railway engineers, however, and railway
directors, care far more for mammon and money than for mounds and
monoliths.

But other and older agents have overturned and uprooted the memorials
transmitted down from ancient times, with as much wantonness as the
railways. Towards the middle of the last century the Government of the
day ordered many miles of the gigantic old Roman wall, which stretches
across Northumberland and Cumberland, to be tossed over and pounded into
road metal. About the same time a Scottish proprietor--with a Vandalism
which cast a stigma on his order--pulled down that antique enigmatical
building, "Arthur's Oven," in order to build, with its ashlar walls, a
mill-dam across the Carron. At its next flood the indignant Carron
carried away the mill-dam, and buried for ever in the depths of its own
water-course those venerable stones which were begrudged any longer by
the proprietor of the soil the few feet of ground which they had
occupied for centuries on its banks.

In many parts of our country our old sepulchral cairns, hill-forts,
castles, churches, and abbeys, have been most thoughtlessly and
reprehensibly allowed, by those that chanced to be their proprietors for