Two thousand years or more ago, the country which we are now gazing over would have borne a fundamentally different character, though its superficial aspect, viewed from this point, might not, apart from signs of human agency, have been so very dissimilar. For at that time practically the whole of the south of England, through all the lower levels, was a wild stretch of brake and forest all but impenetrable, the haunt of wolf and wild boar, of beaver and badger, alternating at the lowest points with swamps and morasses, which formed the beds of the valleys, and either fringed the edges of the streams or mingled composedly with them. This was the great Weald Forest, of which a few detached patches still remain--a tangled sea of green, beneath which all lay submerged save the chalk heights, the North and South Downs, Salisbury Plain, and the mid Hampshire plateau over which we are now looking. At one spot, and practically one spot only, was this forest barrier broken, and that was in mid Hampshire, where the great estuary of Southampton Water and the Vale of Itchen pierced it like a wedge, and gave fairly free access from the coast to the rich midland counties to the north. And so up or by this natural highway the stream of immigration from the south flowed. Celtic peoples from the north of Europe, Goidels, Brythons, Belgans,--all in turn came this way, and here it was, where the Vale of Itchen narrowed, that a settled community began to form--a ganglionic point, as all such communities are, along the nervous thread of intercourse and communication. Down then in the valley at our feet, on the actual ground where our city now stands, amid the morasses wherein peat abounded, and where even now it may still be found, was the first settlement or village of Winchester--a collection of rude hovels, of wattle-work covered with mud, and stockaded with a stout timber palisading as additional protection, while the hill-top, where we now stand, was converted into a fortress or refuge-camp, to all appearance impregnable, so long as heart and hand still existed to defend it. Of the village below all trace has long vanished, but the lines of the earthwork round the hill remain still broadly scarped out, and seemingly imperishable. No mean achievement this--this great rampart over 1000 yards in circuit, and still 25 feet or more in height in places; and when the feebleness of the resources with which those early Celtic sappers and miners worked is borne in mind, the unserviceable pick of deer antler, the absence of means of transport, we wonder more and more at the magnitude of the achievement which has had such permanent result. They dreamt not of a perishable home, who thus could build,