to live down a hundred generations of men. We print them on wood-pulp, which is much the same as printing them on water. It is comforting to think that by the year two thousand one hundred the whole of contemporary journalism, literature and thought will have crumbled to dust. The mosaic, however, will still be in its present state of perfect preservation. Nothing short of dynamite or an earthquake will ever totally destroy the effigies of those Imperial boxers. And a very good thing, too, for the future historians of Rome. For no man can claim that he has really understood the Roman empire till he has studied that mosaic. That pavement is a vessel filled with the quintessence of Roman reality. A drop of that reality is enough to shrivel up all the retrospective Utopias that historians have ever made or ever can make out of the chronicles of ancient Rome. After looking at that mosaic a man can have no more generous illusions about the people who admired it or the age in which it was made. He will realise that Roman civilisation was not merely just as sordid as ours, but if anything more sordid. But in these Etruscan vaults,” Chelifer added, looking round at the frescoed walls, “one gets no such impression of organised and efficient beastliness as one gets from the Roman mosaic. There’s a freshness, as you say, Mr. Cardan, a certain jolly schoolboyishness about all the fun they represent. But I have no doubt, of course, that the impression is entirely fallacious. Their art has a certain archaic charm; but the artists were probably quite as sophisticated and quite as repulsive as their Roman successors.” “Come, come,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget that they called Bacchus Fufluns. Give them at least the credit that is due to them.” “But the Romans too had a fine language,” Chelifer objected. “And yet they laid down immense enlargements of the sporting page of the _Daily Sketch_ in marble tesserae on a foundation of cement.” They climbed again towards the light. The steps were so high and her legs so short that Miss Elver had to be helped up. The tomb resounded with her laughter and shrill whooping. They emerged at last out of the ground. On the top of a high barrow some two or three hundred yards away stood the figure of a man, distinct against the sky. He was shading his eyes with his hand and seemed to be looking for something. Irene suddenly became very red. “Why, I believe it’s Hovenden,” she said in a voice that was as casual as she could make it. Almost simultaneously the man turned his face in their direction. The shading hand went up in a gesture of greeting. A glad “Hullo!” sounded across the tombs; the man skipped down from his barrow and came running across the down towards them. And Hovenden it was; Irene had seen aright.