On the Art of Writing by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Wednesday, November 5

Some of you whose avocations call them, from time to time, to Newmarket may have noted, at a little distance out from Cambridge, a byroad advertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham. It also leads to the site of an old Roman villa; but you need not interrupt your business to visit this, since the best thing discovered there -- a piece of tessellated pavement -- has been removed and deposited in the Geological Museum here in Downing Street, where you may study it very conveniently. It is not at all a first-class specimen of its kind: not to be compared, for example, with the wonderful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measuring thirty-five feet by twenty) of the great villa unearthed, a hundred years ago, at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire: but I take it as the handiest, and am going to build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of a guess. Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretend our guesswork to be something else.