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Swindon and Us Neighbourhood — No. 2. 



it comes to the top: though, to drop the fable and speak more 

 practically, it has not been so much the wheel of fortune that has 

 brought Swindon uppermost as the wheel of the railway engine. 



The same kind of thing has happened in many other places. 

 Mere hamlets have rapidly grown up into large industrial towns. 

 The old rule has been completely inverted. Formerly, it required a 

 certain number of people to be brought to live together before a 

 common carrier with one horse could be persuaded to set up his 

 business. By and by we arrived at a jaunting car or a van. At 

 length, but with much misgiving as to its success, we launched a 

 two-horse coach, a small branch establishment to join us with the 

 main road to London. So the old rule was for the place to grow 

 first, and then followed the means of communication. But under 

 the new system the facility of coming and going is provided first. 

 Stations and J unctions are settled at certain new points, and round 

 those points houses, churches, and streets spring up out of the 

 ground as by magic, and the little village becomes a town. 



Having, therefore, nothing fresh to tell you about ancient Swin- 

 don, and leaving its present history in other more able hands, I 

 would ask you kindly to listen for a little while to a few stray notices 

 of things and persons connected with the places you may visit in 

 your excursions, or, at any rate, with which you may have some 

 neighbourly acquaintance. 



Being archaeologists we should have been in duty bound to pay 

 our first respects to one of those mysterious groups of large stones 

 which once stood in a ground at Broome ; but unfortunately their 

 place knoweth them no more. There was, two hundred years ago, 

 one called Longstone, about 10ft. high, standing by itself near 

 Broome Farm-house, and in the ground below were many others in 

 a straight line. This we are told by John Aubrey, who saw them. 

 I believe the prevailing opinion to be that the greater part of these 

 old stone monuments were sepulchral — some may have been memo- 

 rials of battles or other important events. Poets, when they are in 

 a difficulty, are at liberty — a liberty which is used very freely — to 

 invoke the aid of the Muses to help them out of it; and the Muses 

 seem to be always ready to assist the poet with power of invention 



