winter room with its wide beautiful floor--red and black and
white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist
and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and
beast and bird--all to be covered up with earth so that the
plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and
ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead
city for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls
had a reddish cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red
tile and tessera mixed with it. Larks and finches were busily
searching for seeds in the reddish-brown soil. They would
soon be gone to their roosting-places and the tired men to
their cottages, and the white owl coming from his hiding-place
in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he has
had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into
silence so long ago.




Chapter Ten: The Last of His Name


I came by chance to the village--Norton, we will call it, just
to call it something, but the county in which it is situated
need not be named. It happened that about noon that day I
planned to pass the night at a village where, as I was
informed at a small country town I had rested in, there was a
nice inn--"The Fox and Grapes"--to put up at, but when I
arrived, tired and hungry, I was told that I could not have a
bed and that the only thing to do was to try Norton, which