298 OG1URY BARROWS 



tive style of ornamentation ; for it consisted merely of the 

 print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the 

 moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second 

 specimen of early pottery, one of those curious perforated 

 jars which antiquaries call by the very question-begging 

 name of incense-cups ; and within it we discovered the 

 most precious part of all our ' find,' a beautiful wedge- 

 shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having 

 no consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly 

 appropriated both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and 

 cup as a peace-offering to the lord of the manor for our 

 desecration of a tomb (with his full consent) on the land 

 of his fathers. 



Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of 

 burying their dead ? Why did they anticipate the latest 

 fashionable mode of disposal of corpses, and go in for 

 cremation with such thorough conviction ? They couldn't 

 have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary 

 considerations which so profoundly agitated the mind of 

 ' Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation was still in a very rudi- 

 mentary state in the year five thousand B.C. ; and the 

 ingenious Celt, who is still given to ' waking ' his neigh- 

 bours, when they die of small-pox, with a sublime in- 

 difference to the chances of infection, must have had 

 some other and more powerful reason for adopting the 

 comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference 

 to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due 

 to a further development of religious ideas on the part of 

 the Celtic tribesmen above that of the primitive stone-age 

 cannibals. 



When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the 

 firm belief in another life, which life was regarded as the 

 exact counterpart of this present one. The unsophisti- 

 cated savage, holding that in that equal sky his faithful 



