Jim Davis | Page 9

give orders to the servant, while
Hugh and I slipped down the lane to see how the snow had drifted in
our little orchard by the brook. We had read somewhere that the Red
Indians often make themselves snow-houses, or snow-burrows, when
the winter is severe. We were anxious to try our hands at making a
snow-house. We wanted to know whether a house with snow walls
could really be warm, and we pictured to ourselves how strange it
would be to be shut in by walls of snow, with only one little hole for air,
seeing nothing but the white all round us, having no window to look
through. We thought that it would be wonderful to have a snow-house,
especially if snow fell after the roof had been covered in, for then no
one could know if the dweller were at home. One would lie very still,
wrapped up in buffalo robes, while all the time the other Indians would
be prowling about in their war-paint, looking for you. Or perhaps the
Spaniards would be after you with their bloodhounds, and you would
get down under the snow in the forest somewhere, and the snow would
fall and fall, covering your tracks, till nothing could be seen but a little
tiny hole, melted by your breath, through which you got fresh air. Then
you would hear the horses and the armour and the baying of the hounds;
but they would never find you, though their horses' hoofs might almost
sink through the snow to your body.

We went down to the orchard, Hugh and I, determined to build a
snow-house if the drifts were deep enough. We were not going to
plunge into a drift, and make a sort of chamber by wrestling our bodies
about, as the Indians do. We had planned to dig a square chamber in the
biggest drift we could find, and then to roof it over with an old
tarpaulin stretched upon sticks. We were going to cover the tarpaulin
with snow, in the Indian fashion, and we had planned to make a little
narrow passage, like a fox's earth, as the only doorway to the chamber.
It was a bright, frosty morning: the sun shone, the world sparkled, the
sky was of a dazzling blue, the snow gleamed everywhere. Hoolie, the
dog, was wild with excitement. He ran from drift to drift, snapping up
mouthfuls of snow, and burrowing down sideways till he was half
buried.
There was a flower garden at one end of the orchard, and in the middle
of the garden there was a summer-house. The house was a large, airy
single room (overlooking the stream), with a space beneath it, half-cave,
half-cellar, open to the light, where Joe Barnicoat kept his gardening
tools, with other odds-and-ends, such as bast, peasticks, sieves, shears,
and traps for birds and vermin. Hugh and I went directly to this lower
chamber to get a shovel for our work.
We stood at the entrance for a moment to watch Hoolie playing in the
snow; and as we watched, something caught my eye and made me look
up sharply.
Up above us, on the side of the combe beyond the lane, among a waste
of gorse, in full view of the house (and of the orchard where we were),
there was a mound or barrow, the burial-place of an ancient British
king. It was a beautifully-rounded hill, some twenty-five feet high. A
year or two before I went there it had been opened by the vicar, who
found inside it a narrow stone passage, leading to an inner chamber,
walled with unmortared stone. In the central chamber there were
broken pots, a few bronze spear-heads, very green and brittle, and a
mass of burnt bones. The doctor said that they were the bones of horses.
On the top of all this litter, with his head between his knees, there sat a
huge skeleton. The vicar said that when alive the man must have been

fully six feet six inches tall, and large in proportion, for the bones were
thick and heavy. He had evidently been a king: he wore a soft gold
circlet round his head, and three golden bangles on his arms. He had
been killed in battle. In the side of his skull just above the circle of gold,
there was a great wound, with a flint axe-blade firmly wedged in the
bone. The vicar had often told me about this skeleton. I remember to
this day the shock of horror which came upon me when I heard of this
great dead king, sitting in the dark among his broken goods, staring out
over the valley. The country people always said that the hill was a fairy
hill. They believed that the pixies went