The legionaries first stationed in these East Anglian wastes must often have longed for their native Italy. When the sky sank almost to the level of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and the biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy scrub; when agues or the lurking enemy accounted for many of their comrades, and when some favoured few were recalled to the capital, they must have thought wistfully of a more congenial clime than this, situated on the edge of the Unknown. Rome, either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster, and when no fighting was in prospect employed the troops ingloriously as road-makers. The advanced garrisons in the wilderness cleared the enemy out of the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working parties built roads under the protection of guards, or improved the rude trackways they found already in existence. Some fell by the way, and their skeletons have been found in these latter days, the teeth still clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's mouth to pay Charon for ferrying him across the cold and darkling Styx; or, where the coin has perished, still stained with the metal's long decay. They perished, those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just as countless thousands of our own blood have laid their bones on distant shores, under burning skies or in the Arctic night, to make England what she is. Respect their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you honour your own creeds, take from the dead men their passage-money across that mystic river. XXXV