"Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against
their will?"
"THEY"
One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the
county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-
studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of
the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower
coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen
level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded
hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that
precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States,
I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in
eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks
diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that
cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.
Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it
out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed
a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.
As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the
bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty
miles across the low countries.
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