You also
understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
archaeologists and set out upon your intended tour.
An archaeologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
personal connection with archaeology in any way. He (or she) is a human
being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archaeologist then
and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
half-a-guinea) for that particular archaeological meeting. Who would not
be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
archaeologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,
whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
profound attention.
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