I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive strata--brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement--lies the clay on which London rests. It is a deep, dark hole. It is as if some surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the spine. I look down with awe at the accumulation of nearly two thousand years of known history piled, layer on layer, twenty-four feet above the primal mud. How amazing to gaze down into that pit where the marvellous record of London lies clear as layers of cream in a cake: Victorian, Georgian, Stuart, Plantagenet, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman. There it stops, for there it began. Below, nothing but mud and ooze, hundreds of thousands of years of unrecorded Time, century after century written in mud, forest after forest, springing up, dying, falling into decay; and who knows what awful drama of great creatures struggling in green undergrowth and river slime long before the first man climbed a tree on Ludgate Hill and looked round fearfully on that which was not yet London? A workman clambers into the pit, prods around with a stick, and shouts up to his mate: "Hi, Bill, here's a bit more!" And pat-pat-pat on the parapet fall hard, encrusted fragments that look like flat cakes of sealing wax. I pick them up, knock off the caked earth, and find a beautiful little fragment of deep red pottery, one the rim of a delicate vase, another the rounded base of a little cup, and in the bottom something is written: "Fl. Germanus. F." Just that. What does it mean? It means that I have seen the deep roots of London pulled up, the roots that go right back to Rome. "Fl. Germanus. F." is the trade mark of Flavius Germanus, a potter who lived in the time of the Cæsars, and "F" stands for "Fecit," meaning "Flavius Germanus made it." What a message to receive in modern London behind a hoarding advertising pills, while the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders! * * * Every week a sackful of Rome is dug up in the City of London when a new bank is built. For we stand on the shoulders of Rome. Men from the London and the Guildhall Museums watch the excavations like lynxes, collect the little bits of red pottery, the coins, the bits of green and mauve glass, this wreckage of that first London; that far-flung limb of Rome crowning its single hill. * * * As I stand there, so modern, such a parvenu, an omnibus ticket still stuck in the strap of my wrist-watch, I hold the cup of Flavius. What do I see? I see the first London and its colonists pegging out their camp. Then Boudicca, blood, fire, a ruin. The second London rises from the smoke, a London old enough to have a story to tell the young men; and round this London they are building a wall.