chariots anyhow; and, as soon as they were safe, the horses tore
away again.

The Britons had a strange and terrible religion, called the
Religion of the Druids. It seems to have been brought over, in
very early times indeed, from the opposite country of France,
anciently called Gaul, and to have mixed up the worship of the
Serpent, and of the Sun and Moon, with the worship of some of the
Heathen Gods and Goddesses. Most of its ceremonies were kept
secret by the priests, the Druids, who pretended to be enchanters,
and who carried magicians' wands, and wore, each of them, about his
neck, what he told the ignorant people was a Serpent's egg in a
golden case. But it is certain that the Druidical ceremonies
included the sacrifice of human victims, the torture of some
suspected criminals, and, on particular occasions, even the burning
alive, in immense wicker cages, of a number of men and animals
together. The Druid Priests had some kind of veneration for the
Oak, and for the mistletoe - the same plant that we hang up in
houses at Christmas Time now - when its white berries grew upon the
Oak. They met together in dark woods, which they called Sacred
Groves; and there they instructed, in their mysterious arts, young
men who came to them as pupils, and who sometimes stayed with them
as long as twenty years.

These Druids built great Temples and altars, open to the sky,
fragments of some of which are yet remaining. Stonehenge, on
Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, is the most extraordinary of these.
Three curious stones, called Kits Coty House, on Bluebell Hill,
near Maidstone, in Kent, form another. We know, from examination
of the great blocks of which such buildings are made, that they