17. Ogbury Barrows - Page 2

others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also
understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
archæologists and set out upon your intended tour.

An archæologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
personal connection with archæology in any way. He (or she) is a human
being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archæologist then
and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
half-a-guinea) for that particular archæological meeting. Who would not
be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
archæologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,
whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for
information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with
the prettiest and pleasantest among the archæological sisters, whose
acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and
then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the
protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull
paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house
volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish
church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and
tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be
found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to
him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or
other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of
Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a
correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon