338 Ay AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



We had walked half-a-dozen miles this morning, when I dis- 

 covered I had lost my watch, and turned back. When about 

 three miles from Liphook, I met our landlord of " The Anchor" 

 He had found the watch in my room, and immediately mounted 

 a horse, and rode hard to overtake us. He refused any compen- 

 sation, unless it were " a glass of grog to drink my health." I 

 had happened to show him one of those villainous Spanish quar- 

 ters 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 who had the good taste not to go from 

 Portsmouth to London by " the infernal railways." 



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, picturesque enough in form, 

 high, deep, and broad ; all brown, gray, and black ; sterile, parch- 

 ed, 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 

 " blasted heath." 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 



