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"Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway.
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they."
----- Cowper.
"The waters murmur of
their name,
The woods are peopled with their fame,
The silent pillar lone and gray."
------ BYRON.
BEFORE the Druids
inflamed the people with patriotic zeal to strive against their Roman
assailants, traders to our shores had brought Britain into touch with
the culture and wisdom of the East, for the adventurous Phoenicians had
found in the westmost corner of England there existed a wealth of much
coveted metal. Britain was then an all but undiscovered Ulima Thule to
the civilised world. Herodotus chronicles 500 years B.C. that there was
a land beyond the seas called Cassiterides (tin islands). Aristotle
expanded this brief note and wrote later: "Beyond the Pillars of
Hercules are two islands which are very large—Albion and lerne called
the Britannic, which lie beyond the Celtae." "Here," says Collier, " for
the first time in history, we have the number and the names of the
islands which form the nucleus of our mighty empire." The Phoenicians
concealed the source from whence they drew their supply of tin.
Surrounded by her mist-mantled sea, Albion lay screened, so, watchful
though the Romans were, for long they failed to find from whence the
ships of Tyre and Carthage sailed home laden with their valued cargoes.
Spurred by their love of conquest, determined to find and annex the
country that was rich in this mineral, the Romans never rested till
Julius Caesar eventually came, saw, and conquered. The persistent,
dogged Roman army, which brooked no opposition, forged their iron way
with resolute courage past the thin line of civilisation which girded
the southern seaboard of Albion, and came, after many years, to the
savage, untamed north. They christened the tribes they found there "The
people of the woods," and on their maps Scotland became Caledonia. The
derivation of the name shows that the country was well timbered, and the
invaders repeatedly raised altars to Sylvanus, the god of the woods, for
these fanes we still find. There was one where the Leader and the Tweed
meet near the village of Newstead, which had been erected by Carrius
Domitianus, the prefect of the valiant and victorious twentieth legion.
Further down the Tweed there has been revealed a similar votive
offering, which forms another instance how much the wild and silvan
character of the country disposed the feelings of the Romans to
acknowledge the presence of the rural deities. The junction of rivers
seemed to be a felicitous spot for such memorials. Where the Teviot
mingles with the Tweed there was again an altar to the woodland god. The
modern ducal mansion of Floors, looking down on the spot where the
second James Stuart came to an untimely end, is close by the site chosen
for the shrine erected to propitiate the satyrs and fauns the Romans
believed in and with which they peopled the bosky banks and tangled
copses of this now romantic district. These altars to the sprites of the
greenwood stand near to where, in after time, the great Border
abbeys—Melrose, Dryburgh, and Kelso—arose. The fabled flood of Tweed
flows for ever and ever through the Merse, seeing as it rolls through
the centuries new religions arise, fade, and be succeeded by others.
Roman fane and Christian church alike were built, reverenced, and
crumbled into dust. Wizards were reared and prophesied by the wide Tweed
side, and the greatest of them, Scott, rests by its banks. "Around are
the graves of abbots and monks who lived all through Scottish story,
heard the tidings of Bannockburn, Flodden, Ancrum, and Pinkie, their
matins and their vespers now sunk in one silence of the dead —and only
he in the moving creations of William of Deloraine, and Lucy Ashton, and
Jeanie Deans has an immortality of memory."
The triple heads of the Eildon Hills, like
the unrivalled Tweed at their feet, have witnessed many changes in our
land. A modern writer pictures how generations ago our ancestors had
climbed to the eastmost peak of the Eildons and there, in the track of
the winds, they had built for themselves a village, and raised earthen
ramparts around to protect themselves from their foes, human and
wolfish. Within the fosse were the wives and children, and the men kept
watch over the untamed Merse of Tweed. "One evening the sentinel on the
outer rampart looked over an abyss of darkness at his feet, the steep
earthwork almost fell perpendicularly to the almost perpendicular
hill-side, and in the lull of the wind he heard the hoarse roar of the
Tweed, as it swept in flood through the valley a thousand feet below. No
light anywhere save the will o' the wisp speaking to his savage heart of
bog demons and forest demons, which lured men to untimely graves, or the
fires of possibly hostile village forts on the other side of the valley;
and behind him lay all he knew of home—the tribe and the chief, his wife
and children, his bed of skins and his smoky hut, his favourite dog, and
his quiver of flinted shafts. No wonder it was dear and sweet to him,
and no doubt he would have gladly spent his last and best blood to save
it from demon, beasts, or man, as the Roman who saw on Palatinus the
white porch of his home. But one day from the south, somewhere in the
vast stretch of forest or fen that lay between them and the Cheviots,
their eyes were dazzled by the gleam of sun on bronze armour, and their
scouts told them of swarms of swarthy men, of strange speech and grim
visage, bearing strange arms and great engines of war through the deep
wood, felling the trees, throwing them into marshes, piling stones over
them, and moving in a course as straight as a beam of light towards
their mountain fastness. What happened to the village fort we can safely
guess—a sudden, swift night attack, after a long stealthy climb, and
then the short stabbing sword did its work." Though that was an
oft-repeated tale on the Roman line of march, the surviving vanquished
natives, with hearts anguished for the home and kindred torn from them,
fled for shelter beyond the Forth and Tay. These trained legions from
the Eternal City thus ousted from their strongholds the denizens of
Caledonia's forests. They turned each well- positioned burgh into a
fortified camp, every one of which was a rivet in the links of their
chain of conquest, another step forward in the path of empire. Empire
and road-making went hand in hand, though the tamers of a savage land
may have left their handiwork for others to tread on. In this century,
many a farm cart lumbering along to some outlying field travels by the
Romans' now disused road. Beneath its grass- grown way the stone
ground-work tells us it was engineered by those who, over 1500 years
ago, were our conquerors. Coaches laden with our kings and queens have
driven along their thoroughfares, the very milestones tell how we
learned from them to mark distance. It was by the paved streets, which
the legions from Italy engineered from Thames to Forth and Clyde, that
there travelled to Scotland the message that a new order of things had
come into being, which revolutionised the country, and left more mark
upon it than all the roads these Romans made, or the fundamental laws
they left us. On their eagles' wings to our barbarous, benighted
fatherland, there was wafted north the first whisper of the glad tidings
of great joy, news that a star of hope and peace had arisen in the East,
and its beams would shine and penetrate everlastingly over the world. It
was but a vague report at first, that an insignificant few of the Roman
soldiery brought with them from the south. The main bulk continued to
consult their oracles and rear altars to praise and conciliate the
satyrs and fauns whom they believed dwelt in the dark fir forests of
Caledonia. Besides discovering this to be so timbered a country that
Sylvanus had to be honoured all along Tweed side, the Romans found it
bubbling with mineral waters good both to drink and to bathe in. We have
to thank our invaders for teaching our ancestors to become votaries of
hydropathy, for the conquered people in course of time followed the lead
of the masterful men of Italy. Before the Romans came, the original
inhabitants of Britain stood in oriental awe of water. From their
Eastern ancestors, who had journeyed from sun-smitten plains, there
naturally arose an admiring adoration for wells of water, especially for
springs bubbling up pure and undefiled from out of the brown earth.
Whether the genii of the fountains and rivers were good or evil spirits,
our progenitors were uncertain. The water ways of Scotland, now rivers
of romance, seemed to them occasionally to be possessed by demons who
were hungry for men and beasts. The Borderers realised the
perfidiousness of apparently placidly-flowing streams. The honest Tweed,
swollen by snow and rain, came thundering through the Merse, sweeping
corn and cattle, and all that came within its grasp into its flood. Its
neighbour, the brimming Till, meandering with sinuous twists among green
pastures, with stealthy patience undermined its banks, and many a man
lost his life in its false-flowing waters. In a Border rhyme this sleek,
treacherous river was noted for its cannibal propensities:—
"Says till to Tweed, though you go with
speed, and I go slaw, For every man you drown I drown twa."
Three lines tell a similar tale of a river
further north:- "The
dowie Dean
It runs its lean,
An' every seven years it gets ean."
Rhymes like these, says Alexander Smith in
his Summer in Skye, "are the truest antiques, the most precious articles
of virtu—an authentic bit of terror that agitated human hearts long
ago." It was
averred the kelpie (the water sprite) was heard to wail a dirge before
it claims a life. Its slogan is one of these sad plaints which the wind
pipes, and the waters sing, for nature's voice is often raised as an
earnest of woe. Neith was the goddess of inland waters, and she also,
our ancestors held, took toll in lives for neglect of propitiatory
homage. But the Romans, though believing in water and woodland fetiches,
were also learned in medicines. From Africa's northern shores, where in
Algeria famed baths exist, to the springs gushing out among the moors
and mosses in Caledonia, these keen-eyed Romans discovered and
reverenced healing waters. They founded health resorts which are
unsuperseded to-day, and round which originally villages, then towns
have grown. First the simple spring, upbreaking through the earth, was
fenced with stone and mortar, though many a one, which the aboriginal
Britons and the soldiers of the south drank from, were forgotten and
left neglected. They gurgle on unconfined and unnoticed in solitary
contentment, not aggrieved that an unobserving, though civilised people
knows them not. The springs whose sanitive qualities were venerated were
credited with being under good guidance. In course of time when
Christianity spread, pious anchorites, looking for some hermit's cell,
settled always beside drinkable water, and so spread around them a
saintly peacefulness. Water washed away the dirt of disease, and water,
like fire, licking up the fatal microbe which sowed the seeds of death,
became a friend to mankind. Fire burnt the plague out of London, and
washing in the wells on prescribed days and seasons, without doubt,
cured many who in faith had come there to be healed. Fire and water were
the joint agents in quelling disease, and worshippers of yore mingled
their rights. There were also wishing-wells where people, still induced
by grey-bearded superstition, visit. There, resting on some mossy stone
near to the eternally flowing spring, they wish a WISh and believe the
spirit of the water will hear and fulfil it. To obtain benefit from the
well, to make a peace-offering to the kelpie. who lived near by, the
devotees who came to drink steered their course towards the spring, not
"wither- shins" about.
This word (variously spelt, pronounced
widdershins) indicates the inbred dislike of our people of going
contrary to the greatest of the heavenly lights. Trees in unprotected
positions, which in their youngling days have been twisted west to east
by the prevailing winds, are said to grow withershins. They are held to
be ill-conditioned, or to be possessed of certain uncanny, occult
powers. In the Meeting of he Sun the author says: "The Llama monk whirls
his praying cylinder in the way of the sun, and fears lest a stranger
should get at it and turn it contrary, which would take from it all the
virtue it had acquired. They also build piles of stone and always pass
them on one side and return on the other, so as to make a circuit with
the sun. Mahommedans make the circuit of the Caaba in the same way. The
ancient dagohas of India and Ceylon were also traversed round in the
same way, and the old Irish and Scotch custom is to make all movements
deisual or sunwise round houses and graves, and to turn their bodies in
this way at the beginning and end of a journey for luck, as well as at
weddings and other ceremonies."
In an old song the lady bewails that the
Lowlands of Holland have "twined her love" from her. She knew some ill
fate would befall her sweetheart when he sailed over "the saut sea," for
his ship "went withershins about" on starting. In another ballad the
heroine desires her Tommy to bring from the Howe a stick of-
"Widdershins grow of good rawtree for to
carry my tow,
And a spindle of the same for the twining o't."
Bedevillery was connected with reading
sacred words backwards and going the reverse of the sun. Dr. Walter
Smith in an early poem speaks of this idea:-
"Hech! sirs, but we had grand fun,
Wi' the meickle black died in the chair,
And the muckle Bible upside doon
A'ganging withershins roun and roun,
And backwards saying the prayer
About the warlock's grave,
\Vithershins ganging roun;
And kimmer and carline had for licht
The fat o' a bairn they buried that nicht,
Unchristen'd beneath the moon."
So those who went to worship at wells took
care not to go against the sun, when they brought their sick to drink or
wash in the healing stream. At the summit of the Touch Hills, a little
to the west of Stirling, there may be seen by the curious a crystal well
which in ancient times was believed to possess the peculiar quality of
insuring for a twelvemonth the lives of all who drank from its waters
before sunrise on the first Sunday of May. In 1840 there were old men
and women then alive who in their younger days had been of the number of
those who made an annual pilgrimage to St. Corbet's Well on the morning
in question. Husbands and wives, lovers with their sweethearts, young
and old, grave and gay, crowded the hill-tops in the vicinity of the
well, long before dawn, and each party on their arrival took copious
draughts of the singularly blessed waters. Another spring in St. Medan's
Cave in Wigtonshire had special properties if drunk when the sun rose on
the first Sunday of May. It seemed then to he a cure for all disease;
and again in Galloway in the parish of Bootle there is a fountain called
the Rumbling Well. The sick sat beside it during Saturday night, and
drank of it on dawn of Sabbath morning. The water from this well was
also taken home in casks, and the believers washed their cows with it,
or gave them to drink of these curative waters. The afflicted, who, as
the sun-worshippers of old had done, sat waiting for day before they
drank of the crystal stream, left humble offerings in return for the
good they obtained. The water sprites were not greedy, a little sufficed
as a thanks-offering. Ribbons and shreds of garments taken from the
pilgrims fluttered on the branches of the bushes and trees that grew
near by the spring. Needles and pins were also thrown in, and money
sometimes too was left. A coin of the first James Stuart's period was
lately discovered beside a fountain in Perthshire. To show how inherent
in our nature is the rendering of tribute to the water god, Sir
Archibald Geekie, in his Scottish Reminiscences, mentions that in a well
in Kirkcudbright the lord of the soil told him, in clearing the pool of
debris, coins from the days of the early kings of Scotland and those
bearing our well-known queen's head of the Victorian era were found.
Also he says, seeing a tree gay with colour, for "from a distance it
seemed to be decked with blossoms or leaves of black, white, and red,"
he describes how on inspection they proved to be bits of rag hung up by
the pilgrims who had come to drink of the saint's well that gushed forth
from the shadow of a tree. When cattle benefited by the water, their
shackles and bands were left as a tribute. Madness was cured at St.
Fillan's and at some other wells throughout the country. On a pillar at
the church of St. Fillan's, supposed to be older than the building in
which it stood, the insane were bound and left over-night. If they broke
their bonds, it was asserted they were restored to sound mind. Robert
Bruce washed in a spring near Ayr, but despite the report that this had
cured him, it is feared that he died of leprosy. Water drawn from under
a bridge over which the dead were carried, as well as water flowing
south, were reputed to possess special powers. In the North of Scotland
there is a loch in Strathnaver to which people journeyed to be freed
from all manner of diseases. To bring about this happy result they had
to walk backward into the water, dip themselves therein, and leave a
small coin as an offering. Without looking round, they had to wade in a
direct line back to land, and go right away from the loch. St. Andrew's
Well in the Island of Lewis was frequently consulted as an oracle when
any one was dangerously ill. A wooden tub full of this water was brought
to the sick person's room, and a small dish was set floating in it. If
it turned sunwise, it was supposed the patient would recover, otherwise
he must die. Special fountains proved efficacious when the eyesight was
affected, and a draught from a certain loch in the north cured deafness.
There is nothing new under the sun. These pilgrims of old, thirsting to
partake of purifying waters, were by their trustfulness made whole, like
the faith healers of to-day.
Perthshire was peculiarly productive in
these Siloams, but all over Scotland wells still called holy exist.
Close by Scotland's capital there are many springs whose virtues have
been tried. There is St. Bernard's Mineral Well in the valley of the
Water of Leith, but it is affirmed on good authority that it was not the
abode of a saint of old, but that its medical value was discovered by
some of the Heriot School boys in the eighteenth century. Overlooking
Edinburgh from the ridge of Liberton Hill is St. Catherine's Balm Well.
A thick, oily substance continually floats on its surface. James VI.
visited it, and ordered it to be cleared of refuse, properly closed in,
and provided with a door and staircase, but thirty years later the wall
was destroyed and it was filled up with stones by Cromwell's soldiers.
In succeeding reigns it was again restored, and despite the town
overspreading to the hill around it, the face of its waters are still
sleek with the oily balm which is supposed to he good for those who are
afflicted with cutaneous complaints. Another well within ken of
Edinburgh is that of Loretto at Musselburgh. The chapel to Our Lady of
Loretto was beyond the east gate of the old borough. Pilgrimages from
all parts of Scotland were taken to this shrine. Towards the end of the
sixteenth century a hermit took up his abode at Loretto who was famed
for his miracles. James V. paid a visit to this most noted shrine of
Scotland before he sailed to France to woo his bride. The stones from
the old chapel were accused of being the first after the Reformation to
be devoted to any secular purpose. The people quarried from the chapel
to build a jail. For this piece of sacrilege the inhabitants of
Musselburgh were annually excommunicated at Rome, till the end of the
eighteenth century.
Within nearer range of Edinburgh, under the
shadow of Samson's Ribs, there are the Wells of Wearie. Their romantic,
alliterative title has caught the ear of poets. In an old ballad one
sings:- And ye maun
gang wi' me, my winsome Mary Grieve,
There is naught in the world to fear ye;
For I have asked your minnie and she has gi'en ye leave
To gang to the Wells o' Wearie.
O! the sun winna blink in your bonnie blue
e'en,
Nor tinge your white brow, my deane;
For I will shade a bower wi' rashes long and green
By the lanesome Wells O' Wearie."
Another, who was recently well named the
Benjamin of Edinburgh's gifted literary Sons, in his Songs of Travel
says:— "She rested
by the broken brook,
She drank of Wearie Well,
She moved beyond my lingering look
Ah, whither none can tell."
How these springs at the feet of the great,
green, lion-shaped hill, which keeps everlasting watch and ward over
Edinburgh, came by its name, we know not. It may have been a rest-and-bethankful
nook where the tired wayfarer would pause and wash away travel-stains
before entering the be-castled grey town.
Throughout the length and breadth of
Scotland there are preserved wells still visited and cared for, because
they are credited with healing powers, for custom has become part of our
inheritance, and they, since the days of the far-off past, have been
held sacred. There is a well of as clear water as ever sparkled, by the
trout-famed river Whitadder, where it ripples past Abbey St. Bathan's in
Berwickshire. It was a shrine for pilgrims, for a road leading to it,
still named the Pilgrim's Path, is kept swept and garnished. It runs
parallel to the Bishop's Walk in the same precincts. The votaries who
hied to St. Bathan's Well quaffed honest water. The many anchorites who
in course of time became saints, seeking secluded spots wherein to lead
their solitary, religious life, always settled by some fountain. The
monks from the neighbouring monasteries, to glorify the example of their
lonely brethren, made pilgrimages to these hermitages, and spread over
the springs near the recluses' cells an odour of sanctity. The people,
doubtless from more heathen ages, had paid court to water and readily
followed the footsteps of the holy men. Their idolatry must have
savoured of heathenism, for as early as 1182 Anselm banned well-worship,
and in 1638 the General Assembly of Scotland waged a determined warfare
against it and other relics of barbarian observances however cloaked by
religion. "If persons were found superstitiously," states the law, "to
have passed in pilgrimage to Christ's Well, near Doune, Perthshire, on
the first Sunday of May, to seek their health, they shall repent in
sacco (sackcloth) and linen three several sabbaths, and pay twenty
pounds Scots for ilk fault." This shows how superstition and religious
beliefs are mingled; they are wellnigh impossible to eradicate,
especially from the Celtic mind, which is particularly retentive of
tradition. Pope Gregory (he who sent missionaries first to this pagan
land, for legend reports that he, seeing in the slave-market of Rome
some golden-haired Northumbrian children, would not have them named
Angles but angels) ordered his missionaries not to thwart the people
altogether in their long-implanted heathen habits. Augustine, one of his
messengers to this country in the sixth century, was instructed to bear
in mind that the pagan temples were not to be destroyed, but turned into
Christian churches, that the oxen slaughtered for sacrifice should still
be killed with rejoicings, but their bodies given to the poor, and that
the refreshment-booths round the heathen temples should be allowed to
remain as places of jollity and amusement for the people on Christian
festivals. He realised, with diplomatic tact, that it is impossible to
cut abruptly from hard and rough minds all old habits and customs, for
he who wishes to reach the highest place must rise by steps and not by
jumps. These wily measures taken to gather the pagans about their
Christianised fanes were, however, two hundred years after the Romans
had returned to Italy. A modern writer says of these southern
subjugators of ours, "a few military roads and doubtful sights of camps
and towns, a few traces of public works, all indicating a despotic
military occupation of the country and none of a civilised condition of
the mass of the inhabitants, alone remains to tell the world that here
the Roman power flourished for four hundred years." But we must remember
we also owe them a debt of gratitude that some among their legions
carried to these then far-off islands the rudimentary report of the
gospel of Christianity, as well as their initial lessons in laws and in
medicines which they taught us. Modern science, with its manifold
discoveries of material that can be yoked to work for man's welfare,
was, after all, not so far ahead of these far-seeing Romans. Radium is
found by their mineral wells. Our invaders in days of old, of course,
knew not of it, but in this then wild, untutored country they found
among the forests and fens these health-giving springs whose waters
possessed strange healing powers. Round them they built their villas,
and settled as much as ever they settled in this their northernmost
province, the last they annexed, the first they abandoned. They came
here but on an errand. They fulfilled their task, then returned, for
their hearts were in Italy. They certainly made the best they could of
this mist-shrouded isle when duty stationed them here, and from them our
ancestors learned the rudiments of hygienics. They buried without the
walls of their towns, laying their dead oftentimes round some pagan
fane, but they took care that the temple was beyond their city's gates.
When in course of time churches were scattered throughout the land,
people wished to place the mortal remains of those who had gone hence
under the shadow of the church, so Roman hygienics were forgotten, and
it might have been well for the health of the living community if in
this rule they had adhered to Roman law. The first authorised medical
officers in our isles came with the Roman legions. They brought with
them doctors to attend their troops. The marshes and woods of Caledonia
were far more destructive to the Roman invaders than were the spears,
long swords, and scythed chariots of its painted and almost naked
warriors. The following was an order of the Emperor Aurelian, 270 A.D.
"Let each soldier aid and help his fellow, let them be cured
gratuitously by the physicians, let them give nothing to soothsayers,
let them conduct themselves in their hospitia, and he who would raise
strife, let him be lashed." There are Roman monuments raised in Britain
to physicians who died in service. One lived but twenty-five years, and
the stone and its inscription found in Northumberland is preserved at
Newcastle Museum.
The Romans left their indent on our folk lore, and taught us to hold
springs sacred. Science has trained us how to benefit from the mineral
wells. Endless centuries of approaching them not withershins about has
become as a second nature to us, for we deal cards and pass the bottle
round deisual or sunwise. In parts of our native land, when the dead are
laid in their graves, their resting-place is approached by going round
in the same manner. The bride is conducted to her future husband in the
presence of the minister round the company east to west on the south
side. Among the
endless magical and medical properties that were formerly supposed to be
possessed by human saliva, one is almost universally credited by the
Scottish schoolboy up to the present hour, for few of them ever assume
the temporary character of pugilists without duly spitting into their
hands ere they close their fists; as if they retained a full reliance on
the magical power of the saliva to increase the strength of the
impending blow, if not to avert any feeling of malice produced by it—as
was enunciated eighteen centuries ago, by one of the most laborious and
esteemed writers of that age.
Pliny thus alluded to, in his Natural
History, xxviii. 7, says, "Some persons also before making an effort
spit into the hand in the manner above stated in order to make the blow
more heavy." Many
Roman marriage customs remain amongst us—such as carrying the bride over
the threshold of her new home and the objection to marriages in May, for
that month was dedicated by the Romans to propitiate the spirits of
their dead. During that moon their temples were shut, and further, "for
any couple to contract marriage during this season was held to be a
daring of the Fates which few were hardy enough to venture." Ovid speaks
of the ill luck of lighting Hymen's torch in May.
June, called after the wife of Jupiter, to
make amends for the banning of the previous thirty- one days, smiled on
marriage, and her name month was considered a lucky time to be espoused
in. Though "Like the
swell of some sweet tune,
May glides onward into June,"
so strongly ingrained is the Roman custom
still, that it has become universal in all classes not to marry in May.
How widespread is this belief the smallness of the marriage column in
the Scotsman proves. Many other oddments of the Romans' residence here
remain distinctly visible in our own time. Among others is the Corydalis
lutca, one of the fumitories, which is a native of the Campagna. It
grows on the Borderland on the Roman wall. To this small "short-lived
star of earth" some lines are addressed to-day by Sir George Douglas,
while musing there on Hadrian's dyke:-
"Thy bloom the scent of honey yields,
And thou with spring clost blow;
A Roman flower in English fields
As bright as long ago!
Till as one dreams and idly thinks
On wars and conquests vain;
A simple pastoral garland links
Earth's mightiest nations twain."
Likely the ancestor of this floweret some
soldier of the south brought with him—a keepsake from his sweetheart.
Warmed and ripened on his heart, when he fell it took root in the cold
northern land and flourished despite the unkindly climate. The little
alien fumitory is typical of folk lore, Roman or otherwise. It refuses
to be eradicated, and shines forth along our twentieth-century paths,
telling those who care to look of the conquering race who held us once
in thrall. |
