If the ghosts of the Second Augustan Legion could return for an hour to this their frontier station, deep in the British wilds, they would find ranged and labelled in a neat museum shards of their pottery, broken votive tablets, fragments of sculptured figures, among them a Medusa whose stony stare might seem to have taken effect, urns whose ashes were long since scattered, bits of mosaic pavement, coins, lamps, needles, hairpins, waifs and strays of their "unconsidered trifles." But the fainter wraith of King Arthur would discover no more than a weedy mound and hollow in a ragged field, where autumnal dandelions keep the only glints of his golden memory. We met there an old labourer stooping beneath the heavy sack upon his shoulder. He told us that the mound was Arthur's Round Table, but as for the hollow--apparently the site of a Roman open amphitheatre--he could only shake his grey head and confide: "They do say as was a grand palace there long ago and one day it all sunk under,--sunk way down into the ground." The Usk, which has reflected such lost splendours, empties into the broad estuary of the Severn a little lower down than the Wye which rejoins the greater river at Chepstow. The Severn, which has its rising not two miles from the Wye in the Welsh mountains, makes a wider sweep to the east, crossing Shropshire, Worcester, and Gloucester. Worcester, indeed, mainly consists of the Middle Severn valley, with ranges of low hills on either side. This fertile basin abounds, like the Hereford vale of the Wye, in apple-orchards and pear-orchards, hop-gardens and wheat-fields, but the enterprising little shire has developed, too, a number of manufacturing industries. On the north it runs up into the Black Country of Staffordshire; Dudley, Stourbridge, and Oldbury are murky with the smoke and smudge of factory chimneys. Glass is a specialty of Stourbridge, carpets of Kidderminster, salt of Droitwich, and needles and fishhooks of Redditch. Nail-making used to be the bread and beer of ten thousand cottages at the foot of the Clent and Lickey Hills. But intermingled with its thriving crafts and trades is another wealth of historic associations and natural beauties. In the dense woods which once covered the county, hostile bands have dodged or sought one another from time immemorial, notably during the Civil Wars of Simon de Montfort and of the Roses. Even so late as the Parliamentary War, there remained forest enough to do good service to a fugitive. It was in an oak of Boscobel Wood, on the Salop border, that after the disastrous battle of Worcester "the younger Charles abode Till all the paths were dim, And far below the Roundhead rode And hummed a surly hymn."