early Teuton, were suspended from the columns on which once had been
wreathed the flowers; in the centre of the floor, where fragments of
the old mosaic still glistened from the hard-pressed paving of clay
and lime, what now was the fire-place had been the impluvium, and the
smoke went sullenly through the aperture in the roof, made of old to
receive the rains of heaven. Around the Hall were still left the old
cubicula or dormitories, (small, high, and lighted but from the
doors,) which now served for the sleeping-rooms of the humbler guest
or the household servant; while at the farther end of the Hall, the
wide space between the columns, which had once given ample vista from
graceful awnings into tablinum and viridarium, was filled up with rude
rubble and Roman bricks, leaving but a low, round, arched door, that
still led into the tablinum. But that tablinum, formerly the gayest
state-room of the Roman lord, was now filled with various lumber,
piles of faggots, and farming utensils. On either side of this
desecrated apartment, stretched, to the right, the old lararium,
stripped of its ancient images of ancestor and god; to the left, what
had been the gynoecium (women's apartment).

One side of the ancient peristyle, which was of vast extent, was now
converted into stabling, sties for swine, and stalls for oxen. On the
other side was constructed a Christian chapel, made of rough oak
planks, fastened by plates at the top, and with a roof of thatched
reeds. The columns and wall at the extreme end of the peristyle were
a mass of ruins, through the gigantic rents of which loomed a grassy
hillock, its sides partially covered with clumps of furze. On this
hillock were the mutilated remains of an ancient Druidical crommel, in
the centre of which (near a funeral mound, or barrow, with the
bautastean, or gravestone, of some early Saxon chief at one end) had
been sacrilegiously placed an altar to Thor, as was apparent both from