d news
of wild beasts. There's where you meet hunters, and trappers for the
Circuses, prodding along chained bears and muzzled wolves. Your pony shies
at them, and your men laugh.

'The houses change from gardened villas to shut forts with watch-towers of
grey stone, and great stone-walled sheepfolds, guarded by armed Britons of
the North Shore. In the naked hills beyond the naked houses, where the
shadows of the clouds play like cavalry charging, you see puffs of black
smoke from the mines. The hard road goes on and on--and the wind sings
through your helmet-plume--past altars to Legions and Generals forgotten,
and broken statues of Gods and Heroes, and thousands of graves where the
mountain foxes and hares peep at you. Red-hot in summer, freezing in
winter, is that big, purple heather country of broken stone.

[Illustration: 'There's where you meet hunters, and trappers for the
Circuses, prodding along chained bears and muzzled wolves.']

'Just when you think you are at the world's end, you see a smoke from East
to West as far as the eye can turn, and then, under it, also as far as the
eye can stretch, houses and temples, shops and theatres, barracks, and
granaries, trickling along like dice behind--always behind--one long, low,
rising and falling, and hiding and showing line of towers. And that is the
Wall!'

'Ah!' said the children, taking breath.

'You may well,' said Parnesius. 'Old men who have followed the Eagles
since boyhood say nothing in the Empire is more wonderful than first sight
of the Wall!'

'Is it just a Wall? Like the one round the kitchen-garden?' said Dan.

'No, no! It is _the_ Wall. Along the top are towers with guard-houses,
small towers, between. Even on the narrowest part of it three men with
shields can walk abreast from guard-house to guard-house. A little curtain
wall, no higher than a man's neck, runs along the top of the thick wall,
so that from a distance you see the helmets of the sentries sliding back
and forth like beads. Thirty feet high is the Wall, and on the Picts'
side, the North, is a ditch, strewn with blades of old swords and
spear-heads set in wood, and tyres of wheels joined by chains. The Little
People come there to steal iron for their arrow-heads.

'But the Wall itself is not more wonderful than the town behind it. Long
ago there were great ramparts and ditches on the South side, and no one
was allowed to build there. Now the ramparts are partly pulled down and