Excerpt from Virginie ON the first of June, 1906, I took possession of a furnished bungalow about half a mile from Brattle. In the neighbourhood of Brattle a lucky hedger and ditcher had chanced upon a broken Samian bowl of black clay, adorned with seven nymphs in relief. This broken bowl led to the unearthing of a Roman villa with a small but almost perfect pavement representing the burial of Orpheus by the Muses. In archaeology I am a dabbler, not an expert. But I found the dab bling very pleasant; and b keeping my mouth and my front door shut gave Brattle, quite unintentionally, the notion that I was a sound and profound scholar, and a travelled and prac tised digger into the bargain. Hence it came to pass that the agent of Sir Robert Stacke, on whose land the villa lay, approached me towards the middle of June in a reverential manner and coaxed me into accepting the unsalaried post of excavator-in-chief. Over and above the pleasure it gave me to have a congenial responsibility and a purpose inlife, my new honour did not promise any rich rewards. Beyond the pavement, which had already been visited and copied and written about by armies of antiquaries, both in single spies and in battalions, there seemed to be little left for our spades. A chipped and rain-wom altar, an unusually small sword, a debased, tin washed denarius of Gallienus, a solidus of Dio cletian, and sixty or seventy examples of pottery, all of the Crockhill type, exhausted the list of our discoveries. With the exception of the sword and the denarius, which fell to my share, all these finds were handed over to the Mayor and corporation of Brattle to form the nucleus of a museum. But my post at the villa was fated to bring me more than a debased coin and an undersized sword. One fiercely hot morning in July, when I was sitting alone after breakfast reading a paper in the bungalow garden, I noticed two men passing and te-passing the gate. After lookin at me intently, they lifted the latch and walkeg up to my chair. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.