of the garden there was a summer-house. The house was a large, airy
single room (overlooking the stream), with a space beneath it,
half-cave, half-cellar, open to the light, where Joe Barnicoat kept
his gardening tools, with other odds-and-ends, such as bast,
peasticks, sieves, shears, and traps for birds and vermin. Hugh and I
went directly to this lower chamber to get a shovel for our work.

We stood at the entrance for a moment to watch Hoolie playing in the
snow; and as we watched, something caught my eye and made me look up
sharply.

Up above us, on the side of the combe beyond the lane, among a waste
of gorse, in full view of the house (and of the orchard where we
were), there was a mound or barrow, the burial-place of an ancient
British king. It was a beautifully-rounded hill, some twenty-five feet
high. A year or two before I went there it had been opened by the
vicar, who found inside it a narrow stone passage, leading to an inner
chamber, walled with unmortared stone. In the central chamber there
were broken pots, a few bronze spear-heads, very green and brittle,
and a mass of burnt bones. The doctor said that they were the bones of
horses. On the top of all this litter, with his head between his
knees, there sat a huge skeleton. The vicar said that when alive the
man must have been fully six feet six inches tall, and large in
proportion, for the bones were thick and heavy. He had evidently been
a king: he wore a soft gold circlet round his head, and three golden
bangles on his arms. He had been killed in battle. In the side of his
skull just above the circle of gold, there was a great wound, with a
flint axe-blade firmly wedged in the bone. The vicar had often told me
about this skeleton. I remember to this day the shock of horror which
came upon me when I heard of this great dead king, sitting in the dark