It is an old saying that there is a skeleton in every house, a saying which at one time was practically a fact. Every house in deed and in truth had its skeleton, and moreover every house was designed not only to have its skeleton, but its ghost also. The idea of providing every building with its ghost as a spiritual guard was not of course the primary idea; it developed later out of the original pagan belief of a sacrifice associated with the beginning of every work of importance. Partly with the notion of offering a propitiatory sacrifice to mother earth, and partly also with the idea of securing for ever a portion of soil by some sacrificial act, the old pagan laid the foundation of his house in blood. The art of building in early ages was not well understood, and the true principles of architecture and construction were but little appreciated. If the walls of a building showed any signs of settlement the reason was supposed to be that the earth had not been sufficiently propitiated, and that as a consequence she refused to carry the burden imposed upon her. It is said that when Romulus was about to found the city of Rome he dug a deep pit and cast into it the "first fruits of everything that is reckoned good by use, or necessary by nature," and before the pit was closed up by a great stone, Faustulus and Quinctilius were killed and laid under it. The legend of Romulus slaying his twin brother Remus because he jumped the walls of the city to show how poor they were, probably arises out of a confusion of the two legends and has become associated with the idea of a sacrificial foundation. To the present day there is a general Italian belief that whenever any great misfortune is going to overtake the city of Rome the giant shadow of Remus may be seen walking over the highest buildings in the city, even to the dome of St. Peter's. Sacrifice was not by any means confined to the foundations of buildings only. A man starting on a journey or on any new and important work would first offer a sacrifice. A ship was never launched without a sacrifice, and the christening of a vessel in these days with a bottle of wine is undoubtedly a relic of the time when the neck of a human being was broken and the prow of the vessel suffused with blood as a sacrificial offering. In our own time the burial of a bottle with coins under a foundation stone is the faded memory of the immuring of a human victim. So hard does custom and superstition die that even in the prosaic nineteenth century days we cannot claim to be altogether free from the bonds and fetters with which our ancestors were bound.