56 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



an unbroken roof over the common : except the roads 

 there is not a path in it. For it is a small and narrow 

 strip of but a few acres, without any open space, gloomy, 

 much overgrown by thickets. Last year's leaves lie 

 undisturbed and of the colour of red deer under the silky 

 green new foliage and round the huge mossy pedestals 

 of beech and in caves behind the serpentine locked roots. 

 No child's shout is heard. No lover walks there. The 

 motor-car hurries the undesirable through and down into 

 the Weald. And so it is alone and for themselves that 

 the beeches rise up in carven living stone and expand in 

 a green heaven for the song of the woodwren, pouring 

 out pearls like wine. 



Southward, on either side of the steep road, the slope is, 

 below the beeches, given to corn and hops; at the foot are 

 all the oaks and pasture of the Weald, diversified by hop 

 gardens on many of the slanting fields that break up its 

 surface. Looking back from here the hills above are 

 less finely modelled than the downs still farther behind us 

 in the north. But they also have their shallow coombes, 

 sometimes two tiers of them, and they are indented by 

 deep, wide-mouthed bays. One of them begins in 

 copses of oak and hazel and sallow, a little arable, a farm, 

 three oast cones, and a little steep orchard in a hollow of 

 their own, which give way to hops, followed by grass and 

 then a tortuous ploughland among the oaks and firs of the 

 great woods that cover the more precipitous sides of the 

 upper end of the bay. Exquisitely cultivated, this bay is 

 yet a possession of cuckoo and nightingale, singing under 

 the yellow-green and black-branched oaks and above the 

 floor of bluebell and dark dog's mercury. 



