With their passing away the Roman conquerors have left behind them many relics, possibly in their day considered worthless, but the unearthing of which has caused, for many a year, unalloyed joy and given a priceless treasure to the unwearied antiquaries. Another great source of speculation to the archæologists has been the temple of the Druids erected some time at Stonehenge. It lies beyond the city on the great Salisbury plain. This primitive form of architecture takes us back to many years before Christ, when the early Britons wore no clothes, save the skins of animals they slew in the chase, and when they could neither read, write, weave, nor do anything which would be considered nowadays as civilising. They were to all intents and purposes mere savages, kept in control by their priests and lawgivers, the Druids, whom they held in the greatest respect. The Britons, we are told, had the additional discomfort of dwelling in holes burrowed in the ground, or in miserably constructed huts. In view of this poor state of domestic architecture, how they ever managed to erect roofless temples, as at Stonehenge and at the island of Anglesea, and to overcome, what must have been to them a very great engineering feat, the setting up of the heavy blocks of stone _in situ_, seems marvellous and not easy of explanation. [Illustration: SALISBURY HIGH STREET GATEWAY INTO THE CLOSE] The great veneration in which the Britons held these temples of the Druids is much accentuated by an incident during the second occupation of Britain by the Romans. Suetonius Paulinus, one of their greatest generals, thought that by destroying the temple at the island of Anglesea he would shake the faith of the Britons in their priests, and gain thereby a speedier conquest, much in the same way as when Clive in India knocked down Dupleix's column to undermine the French influence over the natives. In the latter case history has assured us of the ultimate fulfilment of hopes, and it was the same with Paulinus in 61, only on his return to the mainland he all but suffered a reverse from an unexpected rising of Britons under Boadicea. Nevertheless, the power of the Druids was irretrievably broken by the slaughter of their order and the felling of the groves at Anglesea, as Paulinus had foreseen. What the object and origin of these remains at Stonehenge were, still serve as an interesting matter for controversy. Competent authorities, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Polydore Vergil, and in the eighteenth century Dr. Stukely, arrived more or less at the same conclusions. The first named said that Stonehenge was a sepulchral monument erected by Aurelius Ambrosius, who, according to a tradition, was thus led by the counsel of Merlin to commemorate the slaughter of 500 Britons by Hengist, the Saxon chief, about the year 450 A.D. Polydore Vergil confined himself to the statement that it was the ancient temple of the Britons in which the Druids officiated, whilst Dr.