THE COUNTRY-SIDE: SUSSEX. 89 



w ard he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles as they 

 arc called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break 

 the force of the draught along the hill-side, which would 

 have caused too fierce a fire. At one side stood his hut 

 of poles meeting in a cone, wrapped round with rough 

 canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short ladder, 

 he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent 

 half double, and fitted to a handle in the same way as 

 a spade. This was for sifting charcoal when burned, 

 and separating the small from the larger pieces. Every 

 now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and 

 drifted along ; it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick 

 smell of smothered wood coal, to me not disagreeable, 

 but to some people so annoying that they have been 

 known to leave their houses and abandon a locality 

 where charcoal-burning was practised. Dim memories 

 of old days come crowding round me, invisible to him, 

 to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who 

 met with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of 

 mediaeval days, of the noble knights and dames whom 

 the rude charcoal-burners guided to their castles through 

 trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely 

 is there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in 

 some way or other mention these men, whose occupation 

 fixed them in the wildernesses which of yore stretched 

 between cultivated places. I looked at the modern 

 charcoal-burner with interest. He was brown, good- 

 looking, upright, and distinctly superior in general style 

 to the common run of working men. He spoke without 

 broad accent and used correct language ; he was well 

 educated and up to the age. He knew his own mind, 

 and had an independent expression ; a very civil, intel- 

 ligent, and straightforward man. No rude charcoal- 

 burner of old days this, We stood close to the highway 



