I cannot withhold my astonishment, either at the miracles of condensed information displayed in this inscription, which outvies Pitman’s, or any other, shorthand system; or at the diabolic cleverness of whoever first solved the problem it must have presented. It must have puzzled even a good many Roman travellers, and to-day looks very like a “Bill / Stumps his mark” order of monument. The Romans evidently did not understand the first function of a milestone: to present clear and concise information. A modern milestone made in like manner, and inscribed: “During the Kingship of His Most Gracious Majesty Edward the Seventh, son of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, Conqueror of the Boer Republics, in the seventh year of his reign, Emperor of India. To Leicester, Two Miles”—would, it may be suspected, be the subject of unfavourable criticism. It is not a little wonderful that this relic of an earlier civilisation has survived the rough usage that followed its discovery. It was removed to a garden close at hand, and would have been converted into a garden-roller, had it not been for the timeous intervention of Dr. Percy. A little later it narrowly escaped a worse fate, for it was claimed by one of the road commissioners, who would have had it broken up for road metal, had not public interest become aroused; with the odd result that this hoary relic was placed on a pedestal in midst of the town, crowned with a conical-shaped stone, and surmounted by—of all things—a lamp-post! Thus it remained until 1844, when, having been nearly ruined by exposure to the elements, and to wanton mischief, it was removed to its present home. [Sidenote: _DESTRUCTION OF RATÆ_] _Ratæ_ suffered under fire and sword when the protection of the Romans was withdrawn, and lay, the charred funeral pyre of its inhabitants, for long years, the Saxons, after their custom, settling outside the ruined place, alike for sanitary and superstitious reasons. They called their settlement Leir-ceastre, after the original British name, Caer Leir, and thus the name of _Ratæ_ disappeared, save in historical records; becoming the “Leicester” of our day; the “Less-ess-tare” of French visitors, who cannot reconcile the spelling of the name with its pronunciation of “Lester.” The claim of Leicester having been the home of King Lear is based merely on the phonetic likeness of his name to that of the British town. The place had a new era of troubles when, in their turn, the Anglo-Saxons decayed and a more virile race invaded the land. Then Leicester fell a prey to the Danes, whose settlements may be traced at this day in the characteristic ending of Leicestershire place-names in the syllable “by,” peculiar to places of Danish origin: Oadby, Rearsby, Dalby, Sileby, and many others.