II
THE
HUNTING
GROUND
CHAPTER II
THE HUNTING GROUND
In buried cities—Turned up by the plough—Among Saxon and Norman remains—In hidden chambers—In local museums—Dealers' shops—The engraver's art.
The multiplicity of collectable objects needed to supply collectors makes the uninitiated wonder where all these antiques come from. Countless numbers of beautiful objects have found their way into the melting-pot in the past, and what once was old has in some new form become once more a useful article, in its turn to be discarded and perhaps melted up and recast.
In Buried Cities.
The curios which have been preserved for centuries beneath the soil are often of priceless value, telling of the habits of peoples of whom history has told us little. Celts, knives, spear-heads, and food receptacles are discovered on the sites of prehistoric camping-grounds. The delicately tooled bronzes from buried cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum come to us with almost a living force in this twentieth century. As we gaze at the wonderful beauty of their forms and the charming patina of green with which they are covered, we can almost imagine what they looked like in the hands of patrons of art in the far-off times when they were first fashioned. Our own country is full of ruins of ancient cities far below the present roadways. When the Romans built Bath it was in a hollow much deeper than the level of the modern city, and it is in these lower levels that relics of Roman Bath are found.