Here it seems good to know, or to imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the people who occupied this spot in the remote past--Iberian and Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane.

If that hard-featured and sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of the pleasant little city at my feet.

By and by, leaving the ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even back to Neolithic times.
This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its everlastingness.

After all the tempests that have overcome it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time, how stable it is! I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the house I was born in was the oldest in the district--a century old, it was said; where the people were the children's children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of national life.

But the people who had possessed the land before these emigrants--what of them?
They, were but a memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come, a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.
Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one side.