extending from Devon to Scotland.

Such were the old British roads which existed when the Romans came. The
conquerors made use of these ways, wherever they found them useful,
trenching them, paving them, and making them fit for military purposes.
They constructed many new ones which would require a volume for their
full elucidation. Many of them are still in use, wonderful records of
the engineering skill of their makers, and oftentimes beneath the
surface of some grassy ride a few inches below the turf you may find
the hard concreted road laid down by the Romans nearly eighteen hundred
years ago. Roman milestones we sometimes find. There is one near
Silchester, commonly called the Imp Stone, probably from the first three
letters of the Latin word _Imperator_, carved upon it. Curious legends
often cluster round these relics of ancient times. Just as the
superstitious Saxons, when they saw the great Roman roads, made by a
people who had long vanished from the land, often attributed these great
works to evil spirits, and called parts of these well-made streets the
Devil's Highway, so they invented a strange legend to account for the
Imp Stone, and said that some giant had thrown it from the city, and
left on it the marks of his finger and thumb.

Our English villages contain many examples of Roman buildings. Where
now rustics pursue their calling, and sow their crops and reap their
harvests, formerly stood the beautiful houses of the Roman nobles, or
the flourishing towns of Roman citizens. Upon the sites of most of these
old-world places new towns have been constructed; hence it is difficult
often to trace the foundations of Roman cities in the midst of the
masses of modern bricks and mortar. Hence we fly to the villages; and
sometimes, as at Silchester, near a little English village, we find the
remains of a large, important, and flourishing town, where the earth has