Forest that no foot had ever trodden--the thud of the multitudinous
machines driving the piles in the marshy spaces; the whole
innumerable sounds falling on the ear like the roaring of
a great and vast sea.

The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this
is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing
that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power
of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness, in
one day, of an iron way that shall last for all time.

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen
hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch
some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind
it so ineffaceable a mark.

"I intended to ask you just now whether the man you spoke
to in the road was a typical native of the district?" said
Senator Hoar. "He was dark and swarthy, with very black hair
and piercing eyes; not at all like the majority of people
we see in Gloucester for instance." "Yes, he is a typical
Forester"; exactly such a man as Tacitus describes his Silurian
ancestors; so Spanish in appearance that he tries to account
for it by remarking that _"that part of Britain lies over
against Spain";_ as if it was such a short run across the
Bay of Biscay to the upper end of the Bristol Channel that
nothing would be more natural than for Spaniards to sail over
here with their wives and families and become Silures!

These Western Britons, both here in the Forest and in Cornwall
certainly remind one of Spaniards. The type is of an older
Celtic than that of the present Welsh people proper, as some
evidences in the language also point to the occupation being
an older one. With respect to this particular district of
the Forest and the East of Monmouthshire, one more element
must not be left out of the account; and that is, that Caerleon
was founded by the second legion being removed to it from
Gloucester about the time this road was made; and that it
remained for three hundred years the headquarters of that
legion, which was a Spanish one raised in the time of Augustus.
Forty years ago I remember being at Caerleon (two and one
half miles from Newport), when I met the children of the village
coming out of school. It was hard to believe they were not
Spanish or Italian!

At all events this part of Britain lies over against Boston;
and Americans can cross over and see Caerleon for themselves
more easily than the peop