he money he got for 'em ever
prospered, and there wasn't wan of the hosses that haeld 'em that lived
out the twelvemonth; and they do say that some of the stoans do weep
blood, but I don't believe that."

There are many antiquarians who affect to despise the rude architecture of
the Celts, nay, who would think the name of architecture disgraced if
applied to cromlechs and bee-hive huts. But even these will perhaps be
more willing to lend a helping hand in protecting the antiquities of
Cornwall when they hear that even ancient Norman masonry is no longer safe
in that country. An antiquarian writes to us from Cornwall: "I heard of
some farmers in Meneage (the Lizard district) who dragged down an ancient
well and rebuilt it. When called to task for it, they said, 'The ould
thing was so shaky that a wasn't fit to be seen, so we thought we'd putten
to rights and build'un up _fitty_.' "

Such things, we feel sure, should not be, and would not be, allowed any
longer, if public opinion, or the public conscience, was once roused. Let
people laugh at Celtic monuments as much as they like, if they will only
help to preserve their laughing-stocks from destruction. Let antiquarians
be as skeptical as they like, if they will only prevent the dishonest
withdrawal of the evidence against which their skepticism is directed. Are
lake-dwellings in Switzerland, are flint-deposits in France, is
kitchen-rubbish in Denmark, so very precious, and are the magnificent
cromlechs, the curious holed stones, and even the rock-basins of Cornwall,
so contemptible? There is a fashion even in scientific tastes. For thirty
years M. Boucher de Perthes could hardly get a hearing for his
flint-heads, and now he has become the centre of interest for geologists,
anthropologists, and physiologists. There is every reason to expect that
the interest, once awakened in the early history of our own race, will go
on increasing; and two hundred years hence the antiquarians and
anthropologists of the future will call us hard names if they find out how
we allowed these relics of the earliest civilization of England to be
destroyed. It is easy to say, What is there in a holed stone? It is a
stone with a hole in it, and that is all. We do not wish to propound new
theories; but in order to show how full of interest even a stone with a
hole in it may become, we will just mention that the _Men-an-tol_, or the
holed stone which stands in one of the fields near Lanyon, is fla