Falling in Love, page 269 by Grant Allen
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n Ogbury hill-top.
Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended for the pièce de résistance at the funeral banquet. They were clearly the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on the surface of the middle earth.
We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king (after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our archæological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the gay group of picnicking archæologists, it was a curious contrast to reinstate in fancy the scene at