Hangman's Wood, or Hairy Man's Wood, call it which you will, contains something very much more interesting than Peter the Wild Man is to us now, in the shape of what are called locally the "Dene Holes," or sometimes "King Cunobelin's Gold Mines"; for Peter is dead long since, his enigma perished with him, and when all is said and done the chances are that he was neither more nor less than an idiot boy, who grew into an idiot man. On the other hand, these Dene Holes are with us still, and nobody has succeeded in reading their enigma. I obtained an entry to them two or three years ago, having journeyed to Grays for the purpose, simply because the proprietor of the principal hotel in Grays was anxious that some writing person should see and describe these very peculiar excavations, which certainly have not secured anything approaching to adequate notice in recent years from the learned. The hotel-keeper's motives may not have been purely altruistic; altruism, indeed, is not the most conspicuous quality of the average hotel-keeper. He may have suspected that, if the existence of this curiosity were more generally known, visitors would come to Grays, and to his hotel, requiring refreshment and conveyance to Hangman's Wood, both of which he might provide to his profit. To the philosophical mind that makes no difference. The things are either worth seeing, at the expense of some trouble, or they are not. My firm conviction is that they are very well worth seeing indeed, and an attempt shall be made to justify it by describing that which I saw and that which, no doubt, anybody else may see upon applying at this hotel, the name of which has escaped memory. That again does not matter, for once at Grays, there will be no difficulty in finding the hotel that is interested in the Dene Holes.