It has been said that the mediæval story-teller is not unlike a peasant building his hut on the site of Ephesus or Halicarnassus with the stones of an older and more majestical architecture. That Celtic mythology exhibits all the indications of a vast ruin is the opinion not only of Matthew Arnold, but of every competent student of the subject, and it is a matter of discredit that educated Englishmen know so little about it. Among the phenomena of Celtic mythology are numerous identities with tales related by Homer. Sir Walter Scott, alluding to one of these many instances, expresses his astonishment at a fact which, as he says, seems to argue some connection or communication between these remote highlands of Scotland, and the readers of Homer of former days which one cannot account for.[66] His explanation that "After all, perhaps, some Churchman, more learned than his brethren, may have transferred the legend from Sicily to Duncrune, from the shores of the Mediterranean to those of Loch Lomond," is not in accord with any of the probabilities, and it is more likely that both Greek and Highlander drew independently from some common source. The astonishing antiquity of these tales may be glimpsed by the fact that the Homeric poems themselves speak of a store of older legends from an even more brilliant past. Somebody once defined symbolism as "silent myth". To what extent it elucidates primeval custom has yet to be seen, but there is unquestionably an intimate connection between symbolism and burial customs. Among some prehistoric graves disclosed at Dunstable was one containing the relics of a woman and of a child. The authorities suggest that the latter _may have been buried alive with its mother_, which is a proposition that one cannot absolutely deny. But there is just as great a possibility that neither the mother nor the child came to so sinister and miserable an end. Apart from the pathetic attitude of the two bodies, the skulls are as moral and intellectual as any modern ones, and in face of the simple facts it would be quite justifiable to assume that the mother and the child were not buried alive, nor committed suicide, but died in the odour of sanctity and were reverently interred. The objects surrounding the remains are fossil echinoderms, which are even now known popularly among the unlettered as fairy loaves, and as there is still a current legend that whoso keeps at home a specimen of the fairy loaf will never lack bread,[67] one is fairly entitled to assume that these "fairy loaves" were placed in the grave in question as symbols of the spiritual food upon which our animistic-minded ancestors supposed the dead would feed. It is well known that material food was frequently deposited in tombs for a similar purpose, but in the case of this Dunstable grave there must have been a spiritual or symbolic idea behind the offering, for not even the most hopeless savage could have imagined that the soul or fairy body would