What a history lay in the space between the top of the gilded cross and that unhewn slab against which the first human habitation had been erected in England! Wave after wave of races had passed over the spot. Belgic giants had invaded the place, and pushed back aborigines into the unexplored forest depths of the central plain. Then came Romans, and Jutes, and Angles, and Saxons, Norsemen, and Normans. All had passed between that buried stone and that exalted cross. Each had lived awhile here, had multiplied and buried its dead, and offered sacrifice; had raised temple, statue, idol; had bowed down and worshipped, and been driven away by new men who spoke a strange tongue. Each had come with greater power than its predecessor, had conquered, and slain, and pillaged, and overturned the old altars, and set new ones up. Time after time a stronger race bore back a weaker, and upon the site of the temple of the old faith rose the temple of the new. Until William conquered Harold, there had always been a change of faith with each change of masters, and faith had had much to do with strengthening the hands of those who had fought and won. That august cathedral of St Paul's now stood upon a mound formed of mouldered churches and groves and mystic stones, where people had prayed to false deities before the True One had been preached to them. In the crypt of that church stood the carriage upon which the body of the great Duke of Wellington was drawn to sepulchre in St Paul's thirty-seven years after his crowning triumph of Waterloo; and twenty-five feet beneath that car lay the petrified sides of the first boat and the petrified ribs of the first man that ever landed in Britain from the Thames. Partly owing to the silting up by the river, and partly owing to the crumbling of edifices built by man, that island had century after century grown in height and extent, until it had joined another island close at hand, and in two thousand five hundred years raised its head twenty-five feet above the floor of that primal hut. Every inch of that mound is rich in ecclesiastical history, every foot of earth is the record of a century. There is more knowledge to be extracted from this humble English hillock than from all the books of Greece or Rome; for historians and poets often lie, but cairns, the burial-places of a thousand generations, never! Never? George Osborne drew back from the window. Dull light of dawn was beginning to spread over the sky, and take up the city out of the ocean of darkness. Scarcely a sound struck upon the silence of the hour. All was dreary, chill, forlorn. The pale light fell upon the pale countenance of the man. He covered his face.