CHAPTER XVI 



THE END OF SUMMER KENT BERKSHIRE HAMP- 

 SHIRE SUSSEX THE FAIR 



THE road mounts the low Downs again. The bound- 

 less stubble is streaked by long bands of purple-brown, 

 the work of seven ploughs to which the teams and their 

 carters, riding or walking, are now slowly descending by 

 different ways over the slopes and jingling in the rain. 

 Above is a Druid moor bounded by beech-clumps, and 

 crossed by old sunken ways and broad grassy tracks. It 

 is a land of moles and sheep. At the end of a shattered 

 line of firs a shepherd leans, bunched under his cape of 

 sacking, to watch his black-faced flock dull-tinkling in the 

 short furze and among the tumuli under the constant 

 white rain. Those old roads, being over hilly and open 

 land, are as they were before the making of modern roads, 

 and little changed from what they were before the 

 Roman. But it is a pity to see some of the old roads that 

 have been left to the sole protection of the little gods. 

 One man is stronger than they, as may be known by 

 any one who has seen the bones, crockery, tin and paper 

 thrown by Shere and Cocking into the old roads near by 

 as into a dust-bin; or seen the gashes in the young trees 

 planted down Gorst Road, Wandsworth Common; or 

 the saucy " Private " at the entrance to a lane worn by a 

 hundred generations through the sand a little north of 

 Petersfield; or the barbed wire fastened into the living 

 trees alongside the footpath over a neighbouring hill that 



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