ditch in the bog! On they come, in a sort
of huddled procession, carrying something. A
mummy! actually a mummy! but not swathed
like those of Egypt, nor embalmed, except in
the primitive antiseptics of the place. He is
clad in the skin of a beast, and has a sort of
sandal on his feet. He is a man of an ancient
race. But we must not judge of the stature of
his race by his. He is almost as light as
a doll, and as small as a child of ten years
old. Well he may be, for his bones were
all gone, centuries ago—dissolved in the
juices of the bog. His head is just as
hard as the rest of him. He is a piece of
stiff leather, through and through, from
his wasted foot to his shrunk crown. He
was one of the first persons murdered by
the little moss—probably as he was coming
home to his hearthstone from fishing in the
narrowing lake, or hunting on the wooded
hills. His lot now is to be made a show of in
a Dublin museum; and there, alas! to have
his leather limbs filched, bit by bit, by persons
who believe mummy to be a fine cure for
the falling sickness; till at length, to preserve
any remains of this antique citizen, he is
locked up carefully under the charge of
learned men.

This is not the last of the treasures which
the moss is compelled to yield up—not by
many. Again and again, the surveyors and
their men, who are exploring the land and
deepening the rivers, gather about some new
mystery or marvel. "What is this brown
floor on which the spades strike, at a depth
of twenty feet from where the surveyor is
looking down? The surveyor scrambles down
to see. The edge of the floor is found, and
they dig down nine feet further, declaring
that they have found a cupboard twelve feet
square. It is the old house, to be sure, that
stood so prettily upon the green. They are
finding the paved pathway to the hearthstone,
and now the hearthstone; and now they are
picking up the charred nuts that were
gathered to be eaten thousands of years ago.
Instead of being eaten, the destiny of those
nuts was to lie in tan for tens of centuries,
and then to lie on the shelves of a cabinet for
successive generations to wonder at. Something
more touching than that is going on at
some distance. "What can be a more transitory
affair than a child's toy? We talk of childhood
itself as transient, gone while we are
admiring it; and its toys are childhood's
experience of transience. Yet here is the toy—
the wooden sword—that was wielded by a
little hand hundreds of generations back.
That hand, probably hardened in war and
the chace, was dissolved ages ago; and here
is the wooden sword, brown, polished, entire,
singular in its antique shape, and mysterious
as to a certain knob upon it, but otherwise fit
to be made a toy again. No child is to have
it, however. It has become a grave affair by
lapse of time, and it is to lie among the
treasures of the Royal Irish Academy for the
consideration of the learned. Truly, here the
great and the small have lain down together.
The mock sword lay lightly, as if put down
upon a cushion. Here is something so firmly
bedded in, that it seems to be rooted in the
rock below. Here are bones, but they are
like gnarled limbs of a great tree. It takes
a dozen men, with ropes and strong arms, to
move the mass. Then up it comes—an awful
head of an unknown beast. Can it be the
head of a beast? Feel for the spine; dig
down along the expanse of shoulder, and the
depth of limb. It is the skeleton of an animal.
When a naturalist sees a bone or two, he
pronounces it an extinct elk; and when it is
set up, men gaze up from below, and walk
between its legs, and talk wonderingly of the
days when the earth contained such gigantic
creatures as these. The sea has them still;
and in far climes there is the elephant; but
that little Ireland should have been trodden
by these hoofs—how eloquent it makes our
philosophers about the olden time, when the
elk came to drink at the margin of our lakes!

At different stages of the cuttings, the
woods reveal themselves—some growing (as
may be calculated) a hundred years under
the roots of others. The compactness of the
lowest soil may be judged of by this. In this
compact soil lies a stem, its wood of the
closest grain. It is the yew that we saw fall
one of the first victims of the moss. Where
is it last seen in the block? In a garret,
where a young artist lays it across his bench,
and saws a slice off it laboriously, and indents
it with his chisel to show a stranger from
over the sea how fine is the chocolate-coloured
grain, and how well-tempered are the tools
required to carve such a rare piece of ancient
yew.

If the natural lake and woods have been
absorbed and devoured, it is no wonder that
the artificial islands are dissolved. The
stream is to flow here again, and the people
are deepening the channel. In doing so, they
come upon a curious variety of old treasures,
scattered abroad. The more modern iron and
steel weapons have been found on a higher
level—such as were light enough to be borne
up by the little moss. The heavier ones, and
the most ancient bronze weapons are found
the last—sunk in the soil under the bog.
Around are picked up bones the bones of
the cattle and game eaten at the ancient
feasts; and skins which may have covered
boats, or served as clothing. Last of all—
down in the sand, half buried in the clay, there
is a shining of gold. Those old ornaments are
there, once more glancing to the sun now
that it is too late ever to know what was the
race that wore them, and why they were
shaped and worn as they were. Here are
the cheek-plates, and the diadems, and the
gorgets, and the heavy cymbals, and the
strange rings, and the twisted coronals and
belts. Here they are! and when they too are
locked up in a metropolitan museum, we may