Below and beyond comes the Wrekin again, brooding vengefully over the smiling vale, and in wind and storm spreading a greater blackness over the scene: at all times giving a sombre cast to the long straight reaches of the Watling Street. There it has sat, moodily reminiscent, since time began to be. Geologists, who have their reasons for so doing, describe it as “a mass of eruptive greenstone,” and say the Wrekin is “the oldest mountain in England.” Therefore it may well be reminiscent. It has seen mankind emerge from the primeval ooze and floating as invertebrate jelly-fishes in the inland sea that washed its base, and has watched the family history from that interesting era to the present time; through the period of the arboreal ancestor, when the jelly-fishes acquired backbones and prehensile tails and took, as monkeys, to climbing trees; and unless some of the glorified monkeys come meanwhile as engineers and quarry it off the face of the earth, or blast it away, it will probably see the race itself follow the lead given by the governments of this country during the last sixty years, and resume the condition of invertebrata, wallowing in the slime. The Wrekin has seen the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the coming of the Romans and the going of them; saw the first clearings in the primeval forest, the subjected Britons slaving under Roman taskmasters at the making of the Watling Street, and the brief period, centuries later, of coaching. It has looked down over the vale these last sixty years upon the railway, and the time is ripe for another change. Perhaps we are on the threshold of it. It is very still and peaceful on the Roman road, and the traveller has it and its memories wholly to himself. Among those memories is the sad story of Robert Bolas, of Uppington, yonder where the church tower and the hedgerow elms occupy the middle distance, with the Wrekin for background. Robert Bolas came of an old and respected family in Uppington, but that fact did not serve to keep him honest, and it seems that he had long made a practice of stealing wheat from a farm between his village and Wroxeter. It all happened very long ago, but the tale is not likely to be forgotten. The gradual shrinkage of his grain made the owner, a farmer named Witcomb, suspicious, and, with a man named Matthews, he kept a watch. Bolas duly appeared, with an empty sack over his shoulder, which he was proceeding to fill when Witcomb and Matthews made to seize him. Bolas then picked up a bill-hook, and attacking them so furiously that Matthews was killed and Witcomb left, for dead, made off. But it so happened that Witcomb recovered, and the affair, that had in the meanwhile created a great stir in the neighbourhood, was explained. For some reason or another, Bolas was confident of an acquittal, and cheerfully told his friends he would be home in time to harvest his barley.