Pass on, ye Phœnicians! We salute you as the fathers of that vast British commerce which has built up the mighty Empire in which we rejoice to-day. Our busy hives of industry with their great factories and roaring looms; our myriad ships that carry, over every sea to every land, the woven fabrics of our workshops, the coal of our mines, and the iron and steel of our furnaces and forges, all owe their beginnings to you who first set ajar for us the golden gates of trade. [Illustration: =Hunters and Traders.= (_From the painting by Lord Leighton, P.R.A., in the Royal Exchange, London._ _By permission of Mr. Matthews._)] [Illustration] THE ANCIENT BRITONS. “_Where the maned bison and the wolf did roam,_ _The ancient Briton reared his wattled home;_ _Paddled his coracle across the mere;_ _In the dim forest chased the antlered deer;_ _Pastured his herds within the open glade;_ _Played with his ‘young barbarians’ in the shade;_ _And when the new moon o’er the high hills broke,_ _Worshipped his heathen gods beneath the sacred oak._” Here come your first Britons, tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired, long of limb, and ruddy of countenance. Some, from the dense forest interior, are clad in the skins of the bears and other wild animals which they have slain; others wear garments of the rough cloth which they have woven on their own rude looms, or have obtained by barter from traders of distant and more civilized lands. None of them are mere yelling savages, bedaubed with blue war-paint; they have long passed that stage. They are all warriors born and bred, fierce in fight but sociable and friendly in peace. They live in tribes under their “kings;” they graze their cattle, till the land, and search the gravels of the rivers for tin. Let us visit a British “town” of Kent, a century or so before the coming of the Romans, and learn something of the old British mode of life. We plunge into the dark shades of the forest, and follow a narrow track that winds hither and thither through the dense undergrowth. We are armed, for in the thickets and in the caves of the rocky hillocks lurk the gray wolf, the fierce boar, the black bear, and the wild cat. Now and then a startled deer gazes at us for a moment, and bounds away into safety. In the stream which we ford herons are fishing and beavers are building. Overhead the hawks are sailing by, and from a neighbouring marsh comes the boom of a bittern.