We stood at the entrance for a moment to watch Hoolie playing in the snow; and as we watched, something caught my eye and made me look up sharply. Up above us, on the side of the combe beyond the lane, among a waste of gorse, in full view of the house (and of the orchard where we were), there was a mound or barrow, the burial-place of an ancient British king. It was a beautifully-rounded hill, some twenty-five feet high. A year or two before I went there it had been opened by the vicar, who found inside it a narrow stone passage, leading to an inner chamber, walled with unmortared stone. In the central chamber there were broken pots, a few bronze spear-heads, very green and brittle, and a mass of burnt bones. The doctor said that they were the bones of horses. On the top of all this litter, with his head between his knees, there sat a huge skeleton. The vicar said that when alive the man must have been fully six feet six inches tall, and large in proportion, for the bones were thick and heavy. He had evidently been a king: he wore a soft gold circlet round his head, and three golden bangles on his arms. He had been killed in battle. In the side of his skull just above the circle of gold, there was a great wound, with a flint axe-blade firmly wedged in the bone. The vicar had often told me about this skeleton. I remember to this day the shock of horror which came upon me when I heard of this great dead king, sitting in the dark among his broken goods, staring out over the valley. The country people always said that the hill was a fairy hill. They believed that the pixies went to dance there whenever the moon was full. I never saw the pixies myself, but somehow I always felt that the hill was uncanny. I never passed it at night if I could avoid it.