potteries upon the Medway, and glass works near
Brighton. Wherever the Romans have been
living their broken pots are strewn about. So is
their money. So much strewing of money is, to
a people that takes good care of its pence,
unaccountable. When the Roman amphitheatre was
opened at St. Albans, coins were found scattered
over its whole area, and this is but a fair example
of a general fact which has led some antiquaries
to declare that it was a piece of Roman pride to
sow small coinage in the ground that Romans
occupied, in order that the names of Roman
emperors and the reminders of their glory might
be dug out of the earth for our instruction.

The diggings behind the old wall at Wroxeter,
in which we stand, uncover only a part of the
basement of a single house. Whether the upper
part of Roman houses in this country was built
of timber is a question not yet solved, and there
is nothing found here yet that serves for its solution.
This house had certainly an excellent slate
roof, and plenty of glazed windows; not only the
quantity, but also the quality of the glass being
remarkable. One piece of it evidently shows
that it was cast like plate glass in a mould.
Fragments of delicate glass vessels, beads,
brooches, and armlets of women, the peculiar
neck-chains of men known as the torques, but as
yet found here only in bronze, rings, a signet
seal, two little household gods about four inches
high, a Venus and a Diana, bolts, nails, knives,
and stone knife-handles, even a clasp-knife (for
the Romans did carry such knives), a whetstone,
an axe, the print of a sandal on a pavement,
made by some thoughtless man who stepped on
it when it was newly made, are found under these
ruins. I need not multiply the list. As in all
Roman diggings, so also here there is abundant
testimony to the Roman love of oysters. There
are the bones also of all sorts of eatable animals,
and there are so many spurred bones of the
cock's leg, that we may suppose that the Thracian
once tenanting the premises kept fighting-cocks.

But we go back to the child's broken skull.
There are two layers of ashes visible in a section of
the soil, which possibly may inform us that the
town twice suffered capture and destruction.
The Romans themselves tell us no more of
Uriconium than, that it was one of their large
towns in Britain. Near the fastnesses of
warlike clans in Welsh hills, it may have fronted
many an assault of the more independent Britons,
while it held in subjection the weak tribes
herding in forest camps or miserable villages, of
which a few rows of pits are the extant remains.
Often incensed against the oppressions that
accompanied the Roman domination, there may
have been a time when British warriors, mustering
in their strength, plunged through the ford, and
overmatching the armed Thracians who thronged
to the fort, had rushed, mingling wild cries with
wilder cries of despairing women and children,
through the narrow alleys that were streets in
Uriconium. There were forefathers of those
Thracians who had followed Alexander of Macedon
to India. Thrace once had been in Greece,
but not of it. Its people refused the Greek
tongue. Its affinities and those of all the tribes
whose land Roman possession caused to be
named Roumelia, were for Roman ways of thought
and speech. Desperate must have been the
fight of Thracian and Briton met in the tortuous
and narrow streets, usual in any Roman town,
where there was little more than room for one
man in the front to shake his spear or swing his
sword. Crowds from behind pressed on the
combatants. Escape from the press into new
fields of action, into rich harvests of death and
plunder, was through the house-doors. Then
women and old men caught children up, and fled
into the cellars or the hypocausts. The sword
or the fire followed them. The wine-jar was
drained and broken. Gold, silver, and all portable
treasure, was snatched from the wreck by
the plunderer. Blood and wine ran in the
streets; there were songs of revelry, yells of
combatants, curses of prisoners, and shrieks of
women, until evening, when the victors retired,
kindling fire in the houses as they went. Then
the British women, watching on the far heights
of Caer Caradoc, exulted as they saw the city of
the haughty legionaries shine through the dark
night like a beacon fire.

That may have been one day of ruin. But
what the last day of ruin was, we do not know.
Possibly, we have but to dig and learn.

Before I left the field, in one corner of which
the small beginning of an excavation has been
made, the tenant farmer happened to make his
appearance. The ground belongs to the Duke
of Cleveland. The excavators had their leave
to dig from the duke, the steward, and the
tenant himself. It had first been understood
that digging should cease, and all holes be filled
up, by the end of March. Extension of time to
the end of April had been afterwards conceded.
It was then but the first week in April, and
the farmer's impatience led him to pelt the
ears of the gentleman who has most generously
taken upon himself the laborious duties of an
honorary overseer and secretary with oaths
enough to sow the entire field with curses if
they could be scattered bodily about. He swore
that he should come no more to the field, that he
would allow no more visitors from Shrewsbury to
put up horses in his stables, that he would lock his
gate on the next morning, and so forth, and so
forth. It appears that he has kept his word.
Those diggings have been pursued, therefore, no
further.

Holders of other ground within the walls of
the old town are interested in the diggings.
They live close to a great mining district in
which coal and iron, means of present and of
future power, are the objects sought. This
digging back into the power of the past is a
new sort of mining to excite their interest.
They offer no unreasonable obstacle to search.
Already, therefore, the ground has been tapped
in a fresh place with immediate results. The
first thing that came to the surface was a stone
head of the god Pan, with a look of wonder on
its countenance. There has been found a mould