modern metal work. Nay, the very
trumpets which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior's
side, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring back to us
vividly the Homeric pictures of Bronze Age warfare.

The private life of Bronze Age man and his correlative wife is
illustrated for us by another great group of more strictly personal
relics. There are pins simple and pins of the infantile safety-pin
order: there are brooches which might be worn by modern ladies, and
ear-rings so huge that even modern ladies would in all probability
object to wearing them, unless, indeed, a princess or an actress made
them the fashion. The torques, or necklets, are among the best known
male decorations, and are still famous in Ireland, where Malachi
(whoever he may have been) wore the collar of gold which he tore from
the proud invader. Many of the bracelets are extremely beautiful; but,
strange to say, as if on purpose to spite the common prejudice about
the degeneracy of modern man, they are all so small in girth as to
betoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns or
Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothing
here. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casual
observer the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought in
the mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man.

Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half-developed savage: it
left him a semi-civilized Homeric Greek. It came in upon a world of
skin-clad hunters and fishers: it went out upon a world of Phoenician
navigators, Egyptian architects, Achaean poets, and Roman soldiers. And
all this wide difference was wrought in a period of some eight or ten
centuries at the outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simple
bronze axe.

THE ISLE OF RUIM.

Perhaps you have never heard its name before; yet in the earlier ages
of this kingdom of Britain, Ruim Isle, rising dim through the mist of
prehistoric oceans, was once in its own way famous and important.

Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory of our island,
where the land of Kent shelved almost imperceptibly into the Wantsum
Strait, Ruim Island--the Holm of the Headland--stood out with its white
wall of broken cliffs into the German Sea. The greater part of it
consisted of gorse-clad chalk down, the last subsiding spur of that
great upland range which, starting from the central boss of