The private life of Bronze Age man and his correlative wife is illustrated for us by another great group of more strictly personal relics. There are pins simple and pins of the infantile safety-pin order: there are brooches which might be worn by modern ladies, and ear-rings so huge that even modern ladies would in all probability object to wearing them, unless, indeed, a princess or an actress made them the fashion. The torques, or necklets, are among the best known male decorations, and are still famous in Ireland, where Malachi (whoever he may have been) wore the collar of gold which he tore from the proud invader. Many of the bracelets are extremely beautiful; but, strange to say, as if on purpose to spite the common prejudice about the degeneracy of modern man, they are all so small in girth as to betoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns or Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothing here. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casual observer the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought in the mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man. Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half-developed savage: it left him a semi-civilized Homeric Greek. It came in upon a world of skin-clad hunters and fishers: it went out upon a world of Phoenician navigators, Egyptian architects, Achaean poets, and Roman soldiers. And all this wide difference was wrought in a period of some eight or ten centuries at the outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simple bronze axe. THE ISLE OF RUIM. Perhaps you have never heard its name before; yet in the earlier ages of this kingdom of Britain, Ruim Isle, rising dim through the mist of prehistoric oceans, was once in its own way famous and important. Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory of our island, where the land of Kent shelved almost imperceptibly into the Wantsum Strait, Ruim Island--the Holm of the Headland--stood out with its white wall of broken cliffs into the German Sea. The greater part of it consisted of gorse-clad chalk down, the last subsiding spur of that great upland range which, starting from the central boss of Salisbury Plain, runs right across the face of Surrey and Kent, and, bifurcating near Canterbury, falls sheer into the sea at the end of either fork by Ramsgate or Dover. But in earlier days Ruim Isle was not joined as now by flats and marshes to the adjacent mainland; the chalk dipped under the open Wantsum Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-day under the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side in the Thanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of Wight at the ridge of St. Boniface and the central hills about Newport and Carisbrooke. For now the murder indeed is out, and you have discovered already that Ruim--his dim, mysterious Ruim--is only just the commonplace, vulgarized Isle of Thanet.