After some short delay an aged woman produced a substitute in the form of an elfin little maiden of ten or eleven, with great black eyes, half-bashful, half-bold, and jet black hair floating unrestrained over her shoulders. With her bare feet and scanty floating raiment she skipped like a dryad from stone to stone over the rugged pathway, looking back now and again as if in wondering contempt at the lumbering stranger slipping and floundering after her upon the thick carpet of pine needles that clothed the spaces between the boulders forming the track. Track it was and no more, scarped on the hillside, and evidently had been made by hands; for the stones still showed some signs of regularity and the larger masses had been removed to the side, whilst those which stood upon the causeway itself proved by their flat and polished surfaces that ages of human feet had passed over them up and down the hill. As the weird little damsel sprang with the free action of a wild thing from stone to stone, her black hair floating in the pine-scented breeze, it was easy for me to imagine how the people who long, long ago, before history records, had dwelt upon this hill and made this causeway had looked and moved. Racial inundations had passed over the land since then, leaving traces perhaps in this or the other type of the countryside, but the girl’s far-off ancestors, dwelling always upon the same spot, had struck deeper and more lasting root than their stone walls and causeways, and as the little guide flittered up the rough climb before me, the ages seemed to fall away and the dim past to grow in clearness. Half up the hill the trees cease, and the stony causeway rises precipitously through a region of purple heather, broom and yellow gorse, thickly strewn with giant granite boulders. Presently the ruins of a wall of rough stones cemented together stretch across right and left; and running parallel, and just inside of it, a dry water channel well made of hewn stones. The ground-plans and walls a yard or two high, of houses are on all sides of us; and climbing a little higher and turning the shoulder of the hill we see spread before us, covering the whole of the south upper slopes of the declivity, a vast stretch of uncovered ruins—a once-populous town of the unrecorded past.