you with luncheon.  Then you adjourn to the parish church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be found upon the walls of that poky little building.  Nobody listens to him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or other, temp.  Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a correspondingly varied pedigree.  Finally, you take tea and ices upon somebody’s lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d’hote dinner at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and urbane secretary.  That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an archaeological association.

It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury Barrows.  I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn’t read a paper upon their origin and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me, and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological research into the habits and manners of an extremely pretty pink-and-white archaeologist who stood beside me.  Instead, therefore, of boring her and my other companions with all my accumulated store of information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up securely in my own bosom, with the fell design of finally venting it all at once in one vast flood upon the present article.

Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for the praiseworthy negligence of our esteemed secretary), stand upon the very verge of a great chalk-down, overlooking a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose slopes are terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of obviously human and industrial origin.  The terracing must have been done a very long time ago indeed, for it is a device for collecting enough soil on a chalky hillside to grow corn in.  Now, nobody ever tried to grow corn on open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until the present century, because the downs are so much more naturally adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn them into waving cornfields would never occur to anybody on earth except a barbarian or an advanced agriculturist.  But when Ogbury Downs were originally terraced, I don’t doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal warfare still existed everywhere in Britain.  This system is aptly summed up in the familiar modern Black Country formula, ’Yon’s a stranger.  ’Eave ‘arf a brick at him.’  Each tribe was then perpetually at war with every other tribe on either side of it:  a simple plan which rendered foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected home industries.