OGBUKY BAKKOWS 297 



opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we 

 modern Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious 

 mattock the sacred privacy of that cannibal ghost. All this 

 passed like a vision before my mind's eye ; but I didn't 

 mention anything of it at that particular moment to my 

 fellow-archaeologists, because I saw they were all much 

 more interested in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about 

 an exalted personage and a distinguished actress with which 

 the model secretary was just then duly entertaining them. 



Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from 

 the date of the erection of the long barrow, and a 

 new race had come to occupy the soil of England, and 

 had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat, 

 yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were 

 a pastoral and agricultural people, these new comers, 

 acquainted with the use and abuse of bronze, and far more 

 civilised in every way than their darker predecessors. No 

 trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce onslaught 

 the Celtic invaders for the bronze-age folk were presum- 

 ably Celts swept through the little Ogbury valley, and 

 brained the men of the older race, while they made slaves 

 of the younger women and serviceable children. Nothing 

 now stands to tell us anything of the long years of Celtic 

 domination, except the round barrow on the bare down, 

 just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far 

 earlier and more primitive neighbour. 



We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time 

 as the other, and found in it, as we expected, no bones or 

 skeleton of any sort, broken or otherwise, but simply a 

 large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse hand- 

 made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, 

 but not by any means so old or porous as the fragments we 

 had discovered in the long barrow. A pretty pattern ran 

 round its edge a pattern in the simplest and most primi- 



