GOING WESTWARD 211 



It is not a stranger that rides by. I think his fathers must 

 have been in this land when Wolf Hanger was not a 

 strange name for the beeches over the hill. He is a tall 

 straight man with long narrow face, clear, not too 

 irregular features, sallow complexion, black hair and black 

 drooping moustache, and flashing eyes as dark as privet 

 berries in autumn dews. 



Now it is a woodland country, of broad wooded common 

 and low undulating Downs crowned or fringed by woods : 

 this is " Swineherd's County " according to the gypsies. 

 Houses are few and stand either well off the road or with 

 scarcely a dividing line between their gardens and the 

 commons from which they have been filched. Their 

 linen and red flannel flap under enormous beeches where 

 an old track makes its way betwixt them. The children 

 living here, the generations of them who have been bred 

 in the little flint house, are children of the woods, their 

 minds half made by the majestic but dark and deep-voiced 

 trees that stand over them day and night and by the 

 echoes you may hear them summoning the echoes at 

 evening out of the glades and see them pause as if dazed 

 by the wild reply. Opposite the door is a close untrodden 

 tangle of brier and thorn and bramble under oaks where 

 the dead leaves of many autumns lie untouched even by 

 the wind so dense is the underwood that sighs con- 

 tinually in the topmost boughs : at the edge nettles with 

 translucent leaves waver and nod above mossy banks. 

 Not far off is a Woodland Farm, a group of houses and 

 barns and sheds built of flint and wood and thatched, 

 aloof. A man enters one of the cavernous sheds with a 

 pail; a thick, bent, knotty man, with bushy dark hair and 

 beard and bright black eyes, a farmer, the son's son of 

 p 2 



