ions, and each of us in turn had an invitation
to visit him. From the accounts of my cousins it appeared to be a
melancholy business, and it was with mixed feelings that I at last
received my own summons to appear at Rodenhurst. My wife was so
carefully excluded in the invitation that my first impulse was to refuse
it, but the interests of the children had to be considered, and so, with
her consent, I set out one October afternoon upon my visit to Wiltshire,
with little thought of what that visit was to entail.

My uncle's estate was situated where the arable land of the plains
begins to swell upwards into the rounded chalk hills which are
characteristic of the county. As I drove from Dinton Station in the
waning light of that autumn day, I was impressed by the weird nature of
the scenery. The few scattered cottages of the peasants were so dwarfed
by the huge evidences of prehistoric life, that the present appeared to
be a dream and the past to be the obtrusive and masterful reality. The
road wound through the valleys, formed by a succession of grassy hills,
and the summit of each was cut and carved into the most elaborate
fortifications, some circular, and some square, but all on a scale which
has defied the winds and the rains of many centuries. Some call them
Roman and some British, but their true origin and the reasons for this
particular tract of country being so interlaced with entrenchments have
never been finally made clear. Here and there on the long, smooth,
olive-coloured slopes there rose small rounded barrows or tumuli.
Beneath them lie the cremated ashes of the race which cut so deeply into
the hills, but their graves tell us nothing save that a jar full of dust
represents the man who once laboured under the sun.

It was through this weird country that I approached my uncle's residence
of Rodenhurst, and the house was, as I found, in due keeping with its
surroundings. Two broken and weather-stained pillars, each surmounted by
a mutilated heraldic emblem, flanked the entrance to a neglected drive.
A cold wind whistled through the elms which lined it, and the air was
full of the drifting leaves. At the far end, under the gloomy arch of
trees, a single yellow lamp burned steadily. In the dim half-light of
the coming night I saw a long, low building stretching out two irregular
wings, with deep eaves, a sloping gambrel roof, and walls which were
criss-crossed with timber balks in the fashion of the Tudors. The