The clothing as worn by the figures of this wonderful silver bowl is certainly unusual, and does not give one an impression of the conventional Kelt. The men wear a close-fitting combined vest and breeches, usually cut very short in the arm and leg and ribbed throughout like knitted garments. The legs often appear to be clad in smooth leather gaiters extending up the thighs, with low shoes or sandals on the feet. Sometimes the more active men have the short breeches as their only covering, and the arms, legs, and torso are naked. In one of the jumping athletes the combinations' are trimmed with what appears to be a kind of frilling or lace half way up the thighs. Here again is a suggestion of the fashions of Knossos, but it is a far cry from the land of the Kelts to the Eastern Mediterranean, and even the very earliest date that can be assigned to the cauldron is many centuries after the Minoan culture of Crete became a myth.

Five of the figures on the plaques wear spurs and this fact may be of value in the final dating of the vessel. When did the peoples of Northern Europe first adopt the spur ?

The two priestesses are clad in long, apparently woollen, garments extending from the neck to the feet. One of them wears a broad belt with an ornamentation of rings engraved on its surface, the other wears a torque round her neck. Their hair appears to be carefully dressed and finally falls in two thick plaits from the back of the head.

The provenance of some of the animals, the elephants (hopelessly impossible as they are), the leopards, the antelopes, the hyena, is a most difficult question, as bewildering as if a stone deaf person turned and joined in a whispered conversation. The knowledge of these animals seems to remove the artists who made the plaques many hundred miles from Denmark, across Europe to the southeast, where the Kelts touching other cultures to the south and perhaps to the east of them were sufficiently influenced thereby to produce this extraordinary menagerie. This racial contact may have been somewhere near the Black Sea, perhaps in modern Russia, where a culture existed and has been revealed to the Englishspeaking peoples by the admirably illustrated works of E. H. Minns (1913) and M. Rostovtzeff (1922). This culture was indigenous to the Iranians and Scythians of South Russia, and the curious clothing of the figures of the cauldron seems to hint at this contact. But on the other hand it is possible that travelling workers in metals, an itinerant group of goldsmiths from the borderlands of Scythia,

may have penetrated far into the lands of the west and supervised the production of the cauldron for some great Keltic religious centre. Where was this centre? Could it have been in Gaul, or was this sacred place in Britain, where the Keltic religion was finally centralised and taught before the Romans came ?

Silver was very much more precious than gold in Northern Europe before the present era, and the little silver available for trade purposes in prehistoric Northern Europe in the early Iron Age seems to have been provided by Spain.

The fact that nearly pure tin was largely utilised in the construction of the cauldron is not without significance, for Keltic Britain provided Europe with tin before the Romans crossed the Channel.

It is not beyond the bounds of probability that the priests who presided at Stonehenge, or Anglesea, may have used the great silver bowl in some frightful rite, where the hot blood of criminals was used to procure the approval of the Keltic gods.

The evidence of the main facts engraved on this pantheon in silver, the gods themselves, and the undoubted though faint classical influences, seem to point to a very tentative date of about the first century before Christ.

180

CALL IT MURDER.

I.

THE morning after the fire at Sheen's, the London dailies filled their middle page without difficulty. Sheen's, in Oxford Street, was a household word, not only in London and Suburbia, but all over the south and midlands of England. Quite a small fire there would have been an event; a conflagration, with rescues and escapes, with actual fatalities, was a genuine thrill. They made the most of it.

The fire had been full of incident. Ill-natured rivals said that the founder of Sheen's was more properly known as 'Sheeny,' and that his cautious policy, begun in an old clothes depôt in Clerkenwell, had been carried on by the house. Their smaller customers knew them as oily salesmen, pestering and sometimes objectionable creditors. It was no surprise to learn that the Oxford Street buildings were old and obsolete, that improvements -especially in the living-in quarters for the assistants-had not marched with the times, and that inspectors had somehow been put off with very inadequate fire-precautions. It served Sheen's right that on this pleasant May morning three of their girls lay dead and seven more were in St. Paul's Hospital, more or less likely to recover.

Mrs. Morrice read the newspaper accounts over a cup of early tea in her green-and-grey bedroom with shuddering terror. To her, as to so many others, it was like a catastrophe in her own house. Mrs. Morrice was a war widow, attractive and young; and Sheen's was a part of her daily life. Hats and shoes, frocks sometimes, cretonnes, furnishings, scent, manicure, afternoon tea-Sheen's served her with all these things. She was a woman of fixed habits, adhering to one place of business so long as it proved satisfactory— as Sheen's always had. There were people in Sheen's-Mr. Nasely, the manager of the perfumery department; Miss Lane, who fitted her shoes-whom she knew as well as most of her friends, and far better than any of her neighbours. It was terrible to think of Sheen's in a blaze, fire-engines ringing it round, hoses playing, terrified girls caught in the upper flats and screaming.

Her eyes ran swiftly to the casualty list. She knew none of the three girls who had died, but among those in the hospital the

name of Amy Sterritt struck her like a blow. 'Shock and severe burns' said the paper. Mrs. Morrice laid it down.

She looked at her hands with their tended nails, rose-tinted, shining. Only two days ago Amy Sterritt had manicured those nails. Mrs. Morrice was a lady who liked, wherever she went, to be at home in restaurants she tried always to secure the same waiter, at Sheen's she had always had the same manicurist. She liked being manicured; very often in the half-hour between shopping and tea she had her hands attended to. And always, by request, it was Amy Sterritt who came and sat on the little stool beside her and worked with pads and tweezers and talked as she worked. Mrs. Morrice knew Amy Sterritt very well.

She saw her now-tall, fair, gracious of figure, refined and pretty of face. She had had little education in the ordinary sense, but she was a cultured girl, a girl with a mind curiously above the banalities of her class. Mrs. Morrice was very fond of her. The newspaper gave all too vivid an impression of what Amy had been through; Mrs. Morrice pictured it now-the reek and the flames, hysterical girls running this way and that in the trap that held them, one crazy creature jumping from the fourth storey on to the asphalt pavement. . . . She must go down to St. Paul's Hospital at once.

Elsewhere, in Clerkenwell, where the original Sheen had commenced his profitable career, Alf Sterritt and his mother read the paper with white faces. It was their first news of the occurrence, for Sheen's belated messenger did not arrive till two hours later. Alf Sterritt was a motor-mechanic; he read the reporters' masterpieces in a flat, unintelligent voice, while his mother rocked herself in her chair.

'It's our Amy right enough,' he said; his honest brown eyes were round with anxiety.

'Oh, Alfie!' sobbed his mother, rocking to and fro. 'Our Amy! And me not able to get to her.'

Alf gulped his coffee and buttoned up his coat.

'I'll go round to the 'ospital. You might ask Bob to tell 'em at the garage. Grimshaw'll let me off an hour or two, I know. Don't take on, mother; maybe she isn't that bad.'

He kissed her and went out.

There was a third reader of that morning's news to whom the name of Amy Sterritt was its principal item. Mr. Sidney Burt was a commercial traveller for Hobarts, the big scent and soap makers. He was not a bad fellow, good-looking in a cheap sort of way, a

shade too smart in his dress and too assured in his manner, charged with the notions of his class. He was wont to say of himself that he was a one with the girls'; perhaps that was as far as his meagre nature ever got towards an understanding of the idea of love. Yet for some reason Amy Sterritt, quiet, cultured, graceful-all that he was not-loved him; and, nominally at least, Sidney Burt loved her. He admired her tremendously; he liked her tall figure, her carriage, the pale face and fair hair that went so well with his own swarthy handsomeness. She was a good girl to take out, a girl that did a fellow credit anywhere. They were a good-looking pair when they were together; not a doubt of it. They were going to be married-some day.

Mr. Burt read about the fire at Sheen's in the drab coffee-room of a Newcastle hotel. The paper stood in front of him, propped against a colossal cruet; the long table was covered with a stained expanse of cloth, blocked out into subdivisions by flower-pots, more cruets, bottles of pickles. His companion at table was an elderly traveller in the glove line who had just lunched off cold beef, pickled walnuts, and stout, and looked as though this repast were about to disagree with him mightily. He hardly raised his eyes when Burt threw down the newspaper with a theatrical gesture. 'Coo!' said Sidney. 'Member that li'l girl I was speakin' to you about last night?'

The glove man grunted and went on morosely picking his teeth. Sidney's monologue on the subject of his li'l girl'—and his own discrimination and astuteness in picking her out--had driven them all to bed.

'Well!' said Sidney, with fine dramatic effect, 'she's been in that fire at Sheen's. She's in hospital. "Shock and burns," it says. What d'you know about that?'

The glove man either knew nothing or failed to understand American. He grunted again, glaring sullenly at the pickled walnuts as if he yearned for vengeance.

'Coo!' Sidney ran a hand over his carefully-brushed hair. 'This is a knock-out if you like. I tell you, Rivers, old man, that li'l girl-.'

Rivers put down his toothpick.

You better get back to town, 'adn't you?'

'Sure!' Sidney sprang up alertly. First train.' But he stayed to enjoy the situation a minute longer. He gripped the back of his chair.

Godd!' he said thickly, as he had heard it said on the stage.