" OLD COACHING TIMES" 337 



become angry with the farmers who employed them, setting fire 

 to their stacks of grain. This was common. 



We spent the night at the "Anchor" a good, large, old inn, 

 with a finely-shaven plot of turf and well-kept graveled walks, 

 and a good vegetable and fruit garden, with famous gooseberry 

 and apple bushes (apples on dwarf stocks), in the rear. The 

 landlord, a bluff, stout, old man, a little while ago brought ui in 

 samples of five different sorts of malt liquor that he had in his 

 cellar. They vary in strength in the proportions from 8 to 32, 

 and somewhat more in price. 



Before the railways, thirty-two four-horse coaches stopped at 

 this house daily, besides post-coaches, which, when the fleet was 

 about to sail from Portsmouth, passed through the village " like 

 a procession." He then kept one hundred horses, and had usu- 

 ally ten postboys to breakfast, who had been left during the night. 

 Now, but one coach and one van passed through the town. 



June 2lst, 



Near Liphook, instead of the broad, bleak chalk-downs, with 

 their even surface of spare green grass, we find extensive tracts 

 of a most sterile, brown, dry, sandy land, sometimes boggy 

 (moory), producing even more scanty pasturage than the downs, 

 but with scattered tufts of heath or ling. Most of this is in com- 

 mons, and a few lean sheep, donkeys, and starveling ponies are 

 earnestly occupied in seeking for something to eat upon it. Very 

 little of it, for miles that we have passed over, is enclosed or 

 improved, except that there are extensive plantations of trees. 

 Timber grows slowly upon it ; but the shade of the foliage and 

 the decay of leaves so improves the soil that it is worth cultiva- 

 ting after its removal. It is also improved so as to bear tolerable 

 crops, by paring-and-burning and sheep-folding as described on 



the downs of Wiltshire. 



22 



