Through Magic Glasses and Other Lectures Part 15

Into this the bearers pa.s.sed with lighted torches, and in a niche ready prepared placed the dead chieftain in a sitting posture with the knees drawn up, placing by his side his flint spear and polished axe, his necklace of sh.e.l.ls, and the bowl from which he had fed. Then followed the funeral feast, when, with shouts and wailing, fires were lighted, and animals slaughtered and cooked, while the chieftain was not forgotten, but portions were left for his use, and then the earth was piled up again around the mouth of the chamber, till it should be opened at some future time to place another member of his family by his side, or till in after ages the antiquary should rifle his resting-place to study the mode of burial in the Neolithic or Polished Stone Age.

Time pa.s.sed on in the magician's dream, and little by little the caves were entirely deserted as men learnt to build huts of wood and stone.

And as they advanced in knowledge they began to melt metals and pour them into moulds, making bronze knives and hatchets, swords and spears; and they fashioned brooches and bracelets of bronze and gold, though they still also used their necklaces of sh.e.l.ls and their polished stone weapons. They began, too, to keep ducks and fowls, cows and horses; they knew how to weave in looms, and to make cloaks and tunics; and when they buried their dead it was no longer in a crouching position. They laid them decently to rest, as if in sleep, in the barrows where they are found to this day with bronze weapons by their side.

Then as time went on they learnt to melt even hard iron, and to beat it into swords and plough-shares, and they lived in well-built huts with stone foundations. Their custom of burial, too, was again changed, and they burnt their dead, placing the ashes in a funeral urn.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 82.

British relics.

1, A coin of the age of Constantine. 2, Bronze weapon from a Suffolk barrow. 3, Bronze bracelet from Liss in Hampshire.]

By this time the Britons, as they were now called, had begun to gather together in villages and towns, and the Romans ruled over them. Now when men pa.s.sed through the wild country they were often finely dressed in cloth tunics, wearing arm rings of gold, some even driving in war-chariots, carrying shields made of wickerwork covered with leather.

Still many of the country people who laboured in the field kept their old clothing of beast skins; they grew their corn and stored it in cavities of the rocks; they made basket-work boats covered with skin, in which they ventured out to sea. So things went on for a long period till at last a troubled time came, and the quiet valleys were disturbed by wandering people who fled from the towns and took refuge in the forests; for the Romans after three hundred and fifty years of rule had gone back home to Italy, and a new and barbarous people called the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, came over the sea from Jutland and drove the Britons from their homes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 83.

Britons taking refuge in the Cave.]

And so once more the caves became the abode of man, for the hara.s.sed Britons brought what few things they could carry away from their houses and hid themselves there from their enemies. How little they thought, as they lay down to sleep on the cavern floor, that beneath them lay the remains of two ages of men! They knew nothing of the woman who had dropped her stone spindle-whorl into the fire, on which the food of Neolithic man had been cooking in rough pots of clay; they never dug down to the layer of gnawed bones, nor did they even in their dreams picture the hyaena haunting his ancient den, for a hyaena was an animal they had never seen. Still less would they have believed that at one time, countless ages before, their island had been part of the continent, and that men, living in the cave where they now lay, had cut down trees with rough flints, and fought with such unknown animals as the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger.

But the magician saw it all pa.s.sing before him, even as he also saw these Britons carrying into the cave their brooches, bracelets, and finger rings, their iron spears and bronze daggers, and all their little household treasures which they had saved in their flight. And among these, mingling in the heap, he recognised Roman coins bearing the inscription of the Emperor Constantine, and he knew that it was by these coins that he had, a few days before in Yorkshire, been able to fix the date of the British occupation of a cave.

And with this his dream ended, and he found himself clutching firmly the horn on which Palaeolithic man had engraved the figure of the reindeer.

He rose, and stretching himself crossed the sunny gra.s.s plot of the quadrangle and entered his cla.s.sroom. The boys wondered as he began his lecture at the far-away look in his eyes. They did not know how he had pa.s.sed through a vision of countless ages; but that afternoon, for the first time, they realised, as he unfolded scene after scene, the history of "The Men of Ancient Days."