Over-valued Relics 41 



flint stones and lumps of chalky rubble rolling down from 

 above one by one in the passage of the years have accu- 

 mulated : so that the turf there is almost hidden as by a 

 stony cascade. 



On 1 the ridge here is a thicket of furze, grown shrub- 

 like and strong, being untouched by woodman's tool ; here 

 the rabbits have their ' buries,' and be careful how you 

 thread your way between the bushes, for the ground is 

 undermined with innumerable flint-pits long abandoned. 

 This is the favourite resort of the chats, who perch on the 

 furze or on the heaps of flints, perpetually iterating their 

 one note, from which their name seems taken. Within 

 the enclosure of the old earthwork itself the flint-diggers 

 have been at work : they occasionally find a few fragments 

 of rusty metal, doubtless relics of ancient weapons ; but 

 little worth preserving is ever found there. Such trea- 

 sures are much more frequently discovered in the corn- 

 fields of the plain immediately beneath than here in the 

 camp where one would naturally look for them. 



The labourers who pick up these things often put an 

 immensely exaggerated value on them : a worn Roman 

 coin of the commonest kind, of which hundreds are in 

 existence, they imagine to be worth a week's wages, till 

 after refusing its real value from a collector they finally 

 visit a watchmaker whose aquafortis test proves the sup- 

 posed gold to be brass. So, too, with fossils : a man 

 brought me a common echinus, and expected a couple of 

 4 crownds ' at least for it ; nothing could convince him that, 

 although not often found just in that district, in others 

 they were numerous. The c crownd ' is still the unit, the 

 favourite coin of the labourers, especially the elder folk. 

 They use the word something in the same sense as the 

 dollar, and look with regret upon the gradual disappear- 



