4 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND. 



To see the country, as Cobbett sagely 

 observed, and so to be free of the Hmitations 

 of the highroad, one must either ride on 

 horseback or walk. So with Riicksack on my 

 back I began my walk amid the Hampshire 

 Highlands ; and in the autumn of 1910 found 

 myself on the top of Inkpen Beacon, with my 

 face set towards the valley which leads to 

 Cobbett's favourite resting-place, Hurstbourne 

 Tarrant. 



On the wind-swept summit of Inkpen 

 Beacon stands a gibbet. A gibbet has stood 

 there, so the shepherds tell me, for over two 

 hundred years, to mark the hanging of a 

 husband and his mistress who had killed the 

 wife by throwing her into a hornet's nest. 

 Tragedy takes deeper root in the country 

 than it does in the town. In the sunlit 

 country purple shadows are visualised more 

 intently than in the grey-toned city. To-day, 

 the gibbet standing 1000 feet high, where the 

 wind is ever moaning through its arms grimly 

 extended agahist a cloud -racked sky, is a 

 sinister symbol of the tragedy daily enacted 

 in a land bereft of human life. 



Here, in days gone by, beacon fires blazed 

 in commemoration of Imperial triumphs. 



