“It became necessary to lay a drain across it, and a big trench was dug.  One day they came and told me that the workmen had found something—­would I go and look at it?  I went out and found that they had unearthed a large Roman cinerary urn, containing some calcined bones.  I told the lord of the manor, who is a squire in the next parish, and he and I after that kept a look-out over the workmen.  We found another urn, and another, both full of bones.  Then we found a big glass vessel, also containing bones.  The squire got interested in the thing, and eventually had the whole place dug out.  We found a large enclosure, once surrounded by a stone wall, of which you see the remains; in two of the corners there was an enormous deposit of wood ashes, in deep pits, which looked as if great fires had burnt there; and the walls in those two corners were all calcined and smoke-stained.  We found fifty or sixty urns, all full of bones; and in another corner there was a deep shaft, like a well, dug in the chalk, with handholds down the sides, also full of calcined bones.  We found a few coins, and in one place a conglomeration of rust that looked as if it might have been a heap of tools or weapons.  We set the antiquaries to work, and they pronounced it to be what is called a Roman Ustrinum—­that is to say, a public crematorium, where people who could not afford a separate funeral might bring a corpse to be burnt.  If they had no place to deposit the urn, in which the bones were enclosed, they were allowed, it seems, to bury the urn there, until such time as they cared to remove it.  There was a big Roman settlement here, you know.  There was a fort on the hill there, and the sites of several large Roman villas have been discovered in the neighbourhood.  This place must have stood rather lonely, away from the town, probably in the wood which then covered the whole of this county; but it is curious, is it not?” said the vicar, “that the tradition should have been handed down through all these centuries of its being an ill-omened place, long after any tradition of what the uses of the spot were!”

It was curious indeed!  The vicar was presently called away, and I sate musing over the strange old story.  I could fancy the place as it must have been, standing with its high blank walls in a clearing of the forest, with perhaps a great column of evil-smelling smoke drifting in oily waves over the corner of the wall, telling of the sad rites that were going on within.  I could fancy heavy-eyed mourners dragging a bier up to the gates, with a silent form lying upon it, waiting in pale dismay until the great doors were flung open by the sombre rough attendants of the place; until they could see the ugly enclosure, with the wood piled high in the pit for the last sad service.  Then would follow the burning and the drenching of the ashes, the gathering of the bones—­all that was left of one so dear, father or mother, boy or maiden—­the enclosing of them in the