Edwitha's dishes were nearly all of the old Roman ware. The fragments were deep red, and some had little black figures and decorations on them. No two fitted together, and there were no pieces large enough for her to make out what the dish had been like. She used to wonder what sort of people had used those dishes, and whether they lived very differently from the Sussex people who came after them. It seemed as if they must have. No dishes made nowadays had any such appearance. Audrey did not care about such matters. She preferred a bowl and jug she had which came from the pottery, and were whole, and would hold milk and honey. When the two girls ate their dinner in their bower, as they sometimes did, they used little wooden bowls with horn spoons. Wilfrid was the only person Edwitha knew, besides herself, who was at all interested in the unearthed pottery. He had brought her some of the best pieces she had, and had asked the priest at the village whether he knew who made such things. Father Cuthbert knew that there had been Romans in England, and he told Wilfrid some Roman history, but there was nothing in it about the way in which the Romans really lived. The very road that ran past the bower had been made by the Romans. It gave its name to the farm--Borstall Farm. It was a track cut deep into the chalk of the hill, not more than ten feet wide, leading to the camp which had once been on the top of the Down. Nothing was there now but the sheep and the gorse and the short, sweet grass of the Downs. On a level terrace-like break in the hillside, overlooking the valley, a Roman villa had stood, a great house with white porticoes, marble columns, tiled floors and painted walls. Mosaic pictures of the gods had been a part of its decorations, and if any one had known it, those buried gods were under the hillside quite uninjured--so firm and strong was the Roman cement, and so thorough the work. Hundreds of guests and relatives and servants had come and gone in the stately palace of the provincial Governor; the farm lands around it had been tilled by hundreds of peasants in its two hundred years of splendor. No wonder there were so many fragments! A great many dishes can be broken in two centuries. Pincher, the old sheep-dog, had been invited to the feast in the bower, but when it was ready he was busy elsewhere. Edwitha went looking for him, and after she had called several times she heard his answering "Wuff! Wuff!" and caught sight of him down among the brambles at the boundary-line of the next farmstead. He came leaping toward her, and as she looked at the place where he had been, she saw that a piece of the bank had slid into a rabbit-burrow, and something red was sticking out of the earth. It was a little red bowl.