We have reached Tiptree in imagination from Maldon, and there is no difficulty in doing so by road from the same place. As a matter of fact, my first visit to Tiptree was made from Braintree, whither a morning expedition had been taken to see if General Wynne was at his accustomed post, and the _ignis fatuus_ which lured me and a companion in that direction was the balloon, seen in the air from a long distance, which we found afterwards in the bird-seed field. (In passing, as the officer in the car of the balloon had seen nothing at all of the troops shrouded from his view, the inference that balloons are of precious little use in a wooded country would seem to be fairly obvious.) Leaving the balloon to its fate--although the officer would have liked to commandeer our car for the transport of his mass of collapsed silk--we proceeded by way of Messing to Heckford Bridge. Of these the first-named has been suggested by a learned antiquary, the Reverend H. Jenkins, as a possible site for the stark battle in which Suetonius wiped the army of Boadicea out of existence and avenged the massacre of Camulodunum: "Whoever visits the camp at Haynes Green, near the village of Messing, will be struck with the resemblance it bears to the position taken up by Suetonius. Two large woods, Pod's Wood and Layer Marney Wood, seem to form the narrow gorge in front of the camp which Tacitus mentions." Merivale, who says that the speculations of Mr. Jenkins were useful to him, although he could not go all the way with them, describes the position of Suetonius thus: "In a valley between undulating hills, with woods in the rear, and the ramparts of the British oppidum" (Lexden) "not far perhaps on his right, he had every advantage for marshalling his slender forces.... Ten thousand resolute men drew their swords for the Roman Empire in Britain. The natives, many times their number, spread far and wide over the plain; but they could assault the narrow front of the Romans with only few battalions at once, and their wagons, which conveyed their accumulated booty and bore their wives and children, thronged the rear, and cut off almost the possibility of retreat."