Coming slowly up a steep ascent, where on the summit, among the thorn thickets and the gnarled ashes, was a little lonely inn, he saw a dozen or more men, labouring hard and shouting by the side of the road. The highway had worn itself a gully or hollow, lessening the pull of the hill somewhat, and leaving a low but steep bank of coarse chalky rubble. On the sward a tinker’s donkey was peacefully grazing, heedless of the excitement.
“We’ve got un!”
“Heave un out, you!”
“Lay on, Jim!”
“Let I try!”
“Peach un up!”
“What is it you are trying to do?” asked Felix, guiding his horse up to the group.
“Aw, I seed his toes a’ sticking out,” cried a ploughboy, eager lest his share of the discovery should be forgotten.
“It wur thuck heavy rain as washed the rubble away,” said a man with a leathern apron, doubtless a blacksmith. Nothing ever happens without a blacksmith being in it.
“Mebbe a rabbit a-scratching, doan’t ee zee?” said the landlord of the inn, leaning on his spade and wiping his forehead; for much ale is a shortener of the breath.
“Well, but what is it, after all—a treasure?”
“Us doan’t ’zactly knaw what it be,” said the man nearest the bank, pausing, after swinging his pickaxe with some effect. “But us means to zee. Jim, shove thuck pole in.”
Jim picked up a long stout ash-pole, and thrust one end, as directed, into a cavity the pickaxe had made under a large sarsen boulder, the earth above which had been previously dug away.
“Zumbody be buried thur, paason,” said the landlord. “Mebbe you knaws un? Thur never wur nar a church here as we heard tell on.”
“Hang on, you chaps!” cried the blacksmith, throwing the weight of his body on the pole. The landlord, the ploughboy, and the tinker did the same; Jim and an aged man on the bank heaved at the great stone from above.
“Peach un up!” (i.e. lever it)
“He be goin’.” Felix saw the boulder move.
“One, two, dree!”
“War out!”
They spread right and left. Felix, who did not for the instant comprehend that “war out” meant “clear away,” had much ado to save his horse; for the boulder came with a rush, bringing with it half a ton of rubble, thud on the ground, which trembled.
“Aw, here a’ be!”
“This be uz yod!” (head.) “Warn this be uz chine!” holding up a part of the vertebrae.
“He wur a whopper, you!”
“The gyeaunt Goliar’, I’ll warn,” said the aged man on the bank.
“Don’t disturb the skeleton!” cried Felix, anxious to make scientific notes of the interment; whether the grave was “orientated,” or the knees drawn up to the chin; but in the scramble for the bones his voice was unheeded, and the skeleton was disjointed in an instant. The bones were as light as pith, ready to crumble to pieces and little better than dust, yet still retaining, as it were, a sketch of human shape.
“Drow um in this here,” said the landlord, as the buzz subsided, and holding out a stable-bucket which he had fetched. So skull and femur, radius and ulna—all the relics of poor humanity—were “chucked” indiscriminately into the stable-bucket.
“A’ warn a’ wur buried in th’ time o’ Judges,” said Jim. “Um set up stwuns for memorials, doan’t you mind? Thuck sarsen be all five hunderd weight.”
“Mebbe a’ fowght Julius Caesar,” said the aged man on the bank above. “I’ve heard tell as Julius wur a famous hand a’ back-swording. You med see as uz skull wur cracked with a pistol-bullet—one of thaay ould vlint-locks—and here be th’ trigger-guard.”
From the disturbed earth above he picked up a small crooked piece of brass, which might or might not have been connected with the interment. It passed from hand to hand, till the landlord, rubbing it on his sleeve, found some letters.
“Paason ull tell uz what it means,” said he, giving it to Felix, who spelt out slowly, as he removed the clinging particles of earth.
“G.A.U.D.E.A.M.U.S.”
“What be thuck?”
“ ‘Let us rejoice.’ ”
“Sartinly.”
“My friends,” said Felix solemnly, “this is a fragment from an ancient Roman trumpet—a trumpet sounding to us from the tomb. Let us rejoice in the certainty of the life to come.”
“I be main dry,” said the blacksmith.
“Mebbe you’ll stand us a quart, paason?” said Jim, touching his forelock.
“Will you sell me this little piece of brass?” said Felix.
“Aw, you med take un; he bean’t no vallee to we.”
Felix gave them half-a-crown for the relic, and rode on slowly, while the group adjourned to the inn to drink it, leaving the donkey, their tools, and the bucket by the roadside among the thistles.
“I knaws it bean’t nothing but the trigger-guard of one of them ould hoss-pistols,” the patriarch persisted, “them vlint-locks with brass-barrels—I minds um.”
Felix, as he rode away saddened, thought to himself: “That we should come to this—made in the Divine image, and thrown at last into a stable-bucket! The limbs that bounded over the sward, the nostrils that scented the clover, and the eyes that watched and pondered, perhaps as mine did but now, over the sunset! Ah, the tinker’s ass, browsing on the thistles, is thrusting his nose into the bucket, I see, to sniff contemptuously at it! ‘Let us rejoice’—what a satire—”
“Hi, there! Hoi, you, measter!”
He looked back, saw the landlord panting after him, and drew rein and waited till he came up. What he wanted was to know whether Felix could tell him any further particulars respecting the sudden death of Valentine’s dark horse that had taken place very early that morning, during a private trial upon the downs. One of the men at the inn had recognised Felix as a friend of Valentine, and the landlord said everybody about there was so mixed up and interested in the horse that he had made bold to ask. Felix was quite taken by surprise. The news had not reached Greene Ferne when he called; probably Valentine, after the accident, had been too occupied to
