The times became peaceful: the tide of warfare rolled westward; there were no more ships crossing with fresh invaders; there were no more pirates hovering about the broad reaches of the Lower Thames. The country round London on all sides--north, south, east, and west--was settled and in tranquillity. The river was safe. Then a few merchants, finding that the way was open, timidly ventured up the river with wares such as might tempt those fair-haired savages. They went to the port of which the memory survived. No one disputed with them the possession of the grass-grown quays; there were no people, there was no market, there were no buyers. They then sent messengers to the nearest settlements; these--the first commercial travellers, the first gentlemen of the road--showed spear-heads of the finest, swords of the stoutest, beautiful helmets and fine shields, all to be had in exchange for wool and hides. The people learned to trade, and London began to revive. The rustics saw things that tempted them; new wants, new desires were created in their minds. Some of them went into the town and admired its life, how busy it was, how full of companionship; and they thought with pity of the quiet country life and the long days all alone in the fields; they desired to stay there; others saw the beauty of the arts, and were attracted by natural aptitude to learn and practise them. Others, quicker witted than the rest, perceived how by trade a man may live without his own handiwork and by the labor of his brother man. No discovery ever was made more important to the world than this great fact. "You, my brother," said this discoverer, "shall continue to dig and to toil, in hot weather or cold; your limbs shall stiffen and your back shall be bent; I, for my part, will take your work and sell it in places where it is wanted. My shoulders will not grow round, nor will my back be bent. On the contrary, I shall walk jocund and erect, with a laughing eye and a dancing leg, when you are long past laugh or saraband. It is an excellent division of labor. To me the market, where I shall sit at ease chaffering with my wares and jesting with my fellows and feasting at night. To you the plough and the sickle and the flail. An excellent division." Then more merchants came, and yet more merchants, and the people began to flock in from the country as they do now; and London--Augusta being dead--set her children to work, making some rich, for an example and a stimulus--else no one would work--and keeping the many poor--else there would be no chance for the few to get rich. And she has kept them at work ever since. So that it came to pass when Bishop Mellitus, first of the bishops of London, came to his diocese in the year 604, he found it once more a market and a port with a goodly trade and a crowd of ships and a new people, proud, turbulent, and independent. So began and so grew modern London. [Illustration: STATUETTES: FOUND IN THAMES STREET, 1889 (_Guildhall_)]