204 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE. 



been dressed, I feel pretty confident that it 

 must belong rather to the neolithic than to 

 the bronze age. Hither, some day five 

 thousand years since perhaps ten thousand 

 for all that science can say a crowd of brown- 

 skinned, short-statured tribesmen bore up the 

 dead body of their chief from the village in 

 the clearing on the little stream below. Here 

 with wooden levers and round logs for rollers 

 they toilfully brought together by sheer force 

 of straining sinews these four great ice-worn 

 boulders which lay scattered upon the slope 

 around. On the crest of Mynydd Mawr they 

 hewed them into rough symmetry, and built 

 them into a rude imitation of the royal hut, 

 first placing the three uprights in position, 

 and then prising up the flat roofing-stone with 

 their log rollers over an inclined plane of 

 loose earth. In the hut thus formed they 

 placed the dead body of their chief, with his 

 weapons, his ornaments, and his household 

 goods, that his ghost might eat, drink, and 

 fight in the world of ghosts as it had done in 



