The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hot August weather.  Standing, or as his headmaster would have said, “mooning” by the gate, and looking into that enclosed and secret valley, it seemed to his fancy as if there were a halo about the hill, an aureole that played like flame around it.  One afternoon as he gazed from his station by the gate the sheer sides and the swelling bulwarks were more than ever things of enchantment; the green oak ring stood out against the sky as still and bright as in a picture, and Lucian, in spite of his respect for the law of trespass, slid over the gate.  The farmers and their men were busy on the uplands with the harvest, and the adventure was irresistible.  At first he stole along by the brook in the shadow of the alders, where the grass and the flowers of wet meadows grew richly; but as he drew nearer to the fort, and its height now rose sheer above him, he left all shelter, and began desperately to mount.  There was not a breath of wind; the sunlight shone down on the bare hillside; the loud chirp of the grasshoppers was the only sound.  It was a steep ascent and grew steeper as the valley sank away.  He turned for a moment, and looked down towards the stream which now seemed to wind remote between the alders; above the valley there were small dark figures moving in the cornfield, and now and again there came the faint echo of a high-pitched voice singing through the air as on a wire.  He was wet with heat; the sweat streamed off his face, and he could feel it trickling all over his body.  But above him the green bastions rose defiant, and the dark ring of oaks promised coolness.  He pressed on, and higher, and at last began to crawl up the vallum, on hands and knees, grasping the turf and here and there the roots that had burst through the red earth.  And then he lay, panting with deep breaths, on the summit.

Within the fort it was all dusky and cool and hollow; it was as if one stood at the bottom of a great cup.  Within, the wall seemed higher than without, and the ring of oaks curved up like a dark green vault.  There were nettles growing thick and rank in the foss; they looked different from the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand touch a leaf by accident, felt the sting burn like fire.  Beyond the ditch there was an undergrowth, a dense thicket of trees, stunted and old, crooked and withered by the winds into awkward and ugly forms; beech and oak and hazel and ash and yew twisted and so shortened and deformed that each seemed, like the nettle, of no common kind.  He began to fight his way through the ugly growth, stumbling and getting hard knocks from the rebound of twisted boughs.  His foot struck once or twice against something harder than wood, and looking down he saw stones white with the leprosy of age, but still showing the work of the axe.  And farther, the roots of the stunted trees gripped the foot-high relics of a wall; and a round heap of