126 NATURAL HISTORY OF SUNNINQHILL. 



Fipit, or the bleat of the Snipe, now echoes to the wakening shriek of the 

 locomotive, and trembles at its tread. 



The second cluster of habitations stands in an exactly contrary position, 

 occupying, as I have said, nearly the centre of the parish. This is placed- 

 on the sides and in the bottom of a valley quite divided from the rest, 

 and nearly a mile and a half distant to the north-east, and known by the 

 name of "Cheapside," and abuts upon Windsor Great Park and Virginia 

 Water. In comparison with the first, the country in which this lies, may 

 be termed highly cultivated, as it consists of arable and meadow, intersected 

 with neatly-trimmed hedge-rows, and the odour of peat and turf, which 

 characterizes the inhabited part of the wild district, is seldom met with 

 here; it is altogether of a better style, and many mansions of the gentry, 

 which occupy the rising ground in the neighbourhood, combine to render 

 it the most superior portion. The other which I have mentioned, however, 

 boasts a far more numerous list of the residences of "Les aristocrats," which 

 arc here clustered, as it were, extending from the church and parsonage, 

 (which occupy a position between the inhabited parts as nearly central as 

 possible,) and extending in a south-easterly direction on the sides of the 

 road to London, which runs through the village. 



The houses here are very irregularly scattered; mansions, mere cottages, 

 and small shops of the place, being mingled in strange but not unpictur- 

 esque diversity. This district has had "from time whereof the memory of 

 man runneth not to the contrary," the name of "Beggar's Bush." What 

 was the origin of the appellation does not clearly appear, but it probably 

 arose from camps of gipsies at some distant period, taking up their tem- 

 porary sojourn within its limits. The character of the ground over the 

 whole village is so very much varied, that it is impossible to describe it 

 minutely, being a constant succession of hill and dale, heath and arable, 

 park and meadow, and these so interspersed as to defy a classification. 

 Intersected, however, as it is by these caprices of Nature, the centre ground 

 is assuredly the highest; — the country falling to a considerable valley on 

 all sides of it, although the quantity of wood that now clothes the great 

 proportion renders this less perceptible to the general observer than it other- 

 wise would be. Upon more minute examination, we shall find that a deep 

 valley runs in an undulating and serpentine manner completely through the 

 parish, beginning at its south-western extremity, and running by the church 

 to the extreme east, where it is lost in the wide low flat of Virginia 

 Water. The uneven nature of the roads more deserves the name of undu- 

 lations than hills, which are in a very few instances really steep, and many 

 of these have of late years been considerably lowered; but their general 

 character very strongly proves the agency of water in their original forma- 

 tion. The whole surrounding country, to the eye of the most incurious 



