teps
wound spirally upward, and were cut with great accuracy; but the
drippings from the low roof of the stairway had worn every tread into
a basin and filled it with water. Green slippery weeds coated the
lowest stairs; those immediately above were stained purple and crimson
by the growth of some minute fungus; but where darkness began, these
colors passed through rose-pink into a delicate ivory-white--a hard
crust of lime, crenelated like coral by the ceaseless trickle of water
which deposited it.

At first the explorers supposed themselves on the track of a lost holy
well. They had no candles, but by economising their stock of matches
they followed up the mysterious and beautiful staircase until it
came to a sudden end, blocked by the fallen mass of cliff. Still in
ignorance whither it led or what purpose it had served, they turned
back and descended to the sunshine again; when one of the party,
scanning the cliff's face, observed a fragment--three steps
only--jutting out like a cornice some sixty or seventy feet overhead.

This seemed to dispose of the holy well theory, and suggested that the
stairway had reached to the summit, where perhaps an entrance might
be found. The party returned to Penzance, and their report at once
engaged the attention of the local Antiquarian Society; a small
subscription list was opened, permission obtained from the owner of
the property, and within a week a gang of labourers began to excavate
on the cliff-top directly above the jutting cornice. The ground here
showed a slight depression, and the soil proved unexpectedly deep and
easy to work. On the second day, at a depth of seven feet, one of the
men announced that he had come upon rock. But having spaded away the
loose earth, they discovered that his pick had struck upon the edge of
an extremely fine tessellated pavement, the remains apparently of a
Roman villa.

Yet could this be a Roman villa? That the Romans drove their armies
into Cornwall is certain enough; their coins, ornaments, and even
pottery, are still found here and there; their camps can be traced.
That they conquered and colonised it, however, during any of the four
hundred years they occupied Britain has yet to be proved. In other
parts of England the plough turns up memorials of that quiet home life
with its graces which grew around these settlers and comforted their
exile; and the commonest of these is the tessellated pavement with its
emblems of the younger gods