It is the gentle custom of gamekeepers to slaughter at sight (though not for food) the little preying beasts and birds of the woodlands—owls, hawks, crows, jays, stoats, weasels, and such like. They then nail up their carcases to a shed side, or to a barn door, or on a field-gate, leaving them to rot in the wind for a warning to their live mates—just as in the old days the precarious English kings spiked the heads of traitors on the turrets of the Tower. Foxes you "hunt" to death.
[61]. "The Howes of the Silent Vanished Races"
are, I suppose, the mounds, barrows, tumuli or Fairie Hills, some of them round, some of them long, some of them chambered, beneath which the ancient races of Britain, centuries before the coming of the Saxons and the Danes, buried their dead. So once slept the mummied Pharaohs beneath their enormous Pyramids. Age hangs densely over these solitary mounds, as over the Dolmens and Cromlechs—Stonehenge, the Whispering Knights—and the single gigantic Menhirs—the Tingle Stone, the Whittle Stone, the Bair-down-Man and the demoniac Hoar Stone.
These were utterly ancient and unintelligible marvels even when the monk Ranulph Higden wrote his Polychronicon in 1352: The second wonder, he says, is at Stonehenge beside Salisbury. There great stones marvellously huge, be a-reared up on high, as it were gates, so that there seemeth gates to be set up upon other gates. Nevertheless it is not clearly known nor perceived how and to what end they be so a-reared up, and "so wonderlych yhonged." And yet, they are but as falling apple-blossom compared with the age of the world and the antiquity of the Universe:
1st Gravedigger.Come my spade; there is no ancient Gentlemen but Gardiners, Ditchers and Grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.
2nd Gravedigger. Was he a Gentleman?
1st Gravedigger.He was the first that ever bore Armes.
Hamlet.