Caesar was a broad man from a religious point of view, and favored bringing the Druids before the grand jury. For uttering such sentiments as these the Druids declared his life to be forfeit, and set one of their number to settle also with him after morning services the question as to the matter of immersion and sound money.
Religious questions were even then as hotly discussed as in later times, and Caesar could not enjoy society very much for five or six days.
[Illustration: MONUMENT OF AGRICULTURE, OR ANCIENT SCARECROW.]
At Stonehenge there are still relics of a stone temple which the Druids used as a place of idolatrous worship and assassination. On Giblet Day people came for many miles to see the exercises and carry home a few cutlets of intimate friends.
After this Rome sent over various great Federal appointees to soften and refine the people. Among them came General Agricola with a new kind of seed-corn and kindness in his heart.
[Illustration: AGRICOLA ENCOURAGES AGRICULTURE.]
He taught the barefooted Briton to go out to the pump every evening and bathe his chapped and soil-kissed feet and wipe them on the grass before retiring, thus introducing one of the refinements of Rome in this cold and barbaric clime.
Along about the beginning of the Christian "Erie," says an elderly Englishman, the Queen Boadicea got so disgusted with the Romans who carried on there in England just as they had been in the habit of doing at home,—cutting up like a hallowe'en party in its junior year,—that she got her Britons together, had a steel dress made to fight in comfortably and not tight under the arms, then she said, "Is there any one here who hath a culverin with him?" One was soon found and fired. This by the Romans was regarded as an opening of hostilities. Her fire was returned with great eagerness, and victory was won in the city of London over the Romans, who had taunted the queen several times with being seven years behind the beginning of the Christian Era in the matter of clothes.
[Illustration: ROMAN COAT OF ARMS.]
Boadicea won victories by the score, and it is said that under the besom of her wrath seventy thousand Roman warriors kissed the dust. As she waved her sceptre in token of victory the hat-pin came out of her crown, and wildly throwing the "old hot thing" at the Roman general, she missed him and unhorsed her own chaperon.