Betty followed her to the left of an entrance hall from which a grand staircase rose, into a corridor whose windows gave her a glimpse of a pretty green garden; then down a flight of steps into a big hall below. The floor of this had been hollowed out to look rather like a swimming-bath, but instead of water, the hollow was filled up by the skeleton of a great wooden boat. It was black with age, broken and battered, but the pieces had been carefully fitted together, so that one might at least guess how it looked more than a thousand years ago, when it was new. “It’s a Roman galley!” cried Betty, who had recently seen one, not ancient and decayed, but actually floating upon the Thames. In her excitement she scarcely knew whether to look first at the ancient boat, or at the picture which filled the end wall just above it, and showed a galley rowed by Roman soldiers. “I see! I see!” she cried eagerly. “That’s how the man who painted that picture imagined it looked when it was new, ages ago? He hasn’t imagined it badly, has he, Godmother? The boat is just passing the fortress, and it’s very much like the one we really went up, isn’t it? And he’s made the river clear, with grassy banks, just as it was. And the soldiers are quite good too. They _did_ look like that! Oh! Godmother, how did they find this boat?” “Here’s a notice that will tell you. It was dug up, you see, a few years ago—in 1910, to be precise—when men were at work on a road in Lambeth.” “Under a _road_?” echoed Betty. “But how did it get there?” “Have you forgotten already what you saw yesterday? Don’t you remember that the Thames then spread out all over what is now Lambeth as well as over Westminster on the opposite bank? This boat was found in what _then_ was the bed of the river, and is now land covered with buildings.” “Yes, I understand. Oh, Godmother, do you think it could be the very galley we saw? Perhaps it is!” Godmother smiled. “I’m afraid not. It is thought that this galley was sunk a hundred years or so earlier than the one we saw when we stood on the first London Bridge. But it must have been very like it.” Betty looked up again at the picture. “It shows a piece of the wall that went round London,” she said, gazing at it with interest. “And in the background there is the great forest. Oh, I think the painter has imagined it very well.” “Considering that he hadn’t our magic advantage I think he _has_,” agreed Godmother. Betty was silent a moment, looking down thoughtfully at the remains of the poor battered galley which once sailed so proudly on London’s river, filled with soldiers, their armour and helmets glittering in the sunshine of long ago. There were other things in this basement hall that looked interesting, but Godmother would not let her stay to examine them. “We will go upstairs now,” she said. So up the narrow staircase they went, into the corridor again, and thence to a room with _Roman London_ painted over the door.