168 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



about three miles from Liphook, I met our landlord of &quot; The 

 Anchor.&quot; lie had found the watch in my room, and imme 

 diately mounted a horse, and rode hard to overtake us. lie 

 refused any compensation, unless it were &quot; a glass of grog to 

 drink my health.&quot; 1 had happened to show him one of those 

 villainous Spanish quarters that so successfully hold their 

 place against our legitimate currency, which I had had left in 

 my pocket on leaving New York, and he said, if I didn t value 

 it, he would be glad to take it as a keepsake of us. I have 

 no doubt he will always remember us as the three gentlemen 

 that had the good taste not to go from Portsmouth to London 

 by &quot; the infernal railways.&quot; 



It was a day of thick, rapidly-passing clouds, and in a part 

 of my walk, which was through a well-wooded, rolling country 

 with very steep hill-sides and deep narrow valleys, I saw some 

 most charming effects of broad shadows, chasing over waving 

 foliage, with angel-flights of sunshine, often disclosing long, 

 narrow vistas of distant, deep glens, or glances of still water, 

 becalmed and warm under high, dark, quivering, leafy bluffs. 

 But the greater part of this country (but a day s walk from 

 London) is the most dreary, desolate, God-forsaken-looking 

 land that I ever saw or imagined. Hills and dales, pictu 

 resque enough in form, high, deep, and broad ; all brown, gray, 

 and black; sterile, parched, uninhabited dead : the only sign 

 of life or vegetation a little crisp moss, or singed, prostrate, 

 despairing ling seeming exactly as if an intense fire had 

 not long since swept over it. 



Such was the whole dreary landscape, far and near only this 

 &quot; blasted heath.&quot; A great black squall-cloud had for some time 

 thrown additional gloom a new intensity of gloom over it ; 

 and I was walking slowly, in bereavement of all sympathizing 

 life in this sepulchral ground of Nature, when my eye fell 

 upon a block of stone, bearing inscription &quot; In detestation 



