occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a
curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because its associations had about them
something sinister. Its history proved that. Apart from the sanguinary
nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached
to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had
stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband
was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand
spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her
heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and
that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for
hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic
encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that
secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing
to the top of the enclosure, which few towns-people in the daily round
of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the
turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.

Some boys had latterly tried to impart gaiety to the ruin by using the
central arena as a cricket-ground. But the game usually languished
for the aforesaid reason--the dismal privacy which the earthen circle
enforced, shutting out every appreciative passer's vision, every
commendatory remark from outsiders--everything, except the sky; and to
play at games in such circumstances was like acting to an empty house.
Possibly, too, the boys were timid, for some old people said that at
certain moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting
with a book or dozing in the arena had, on lifting their eyes, beheld
the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian's soldiery as if
watching the gladiatorial combat; and had heard the roar of their
excited voices, that the scene would remain but a moment, like a
lightning flash, and then disappear.