60 WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 



like and strong, being untouched by woodman's tool ; 

 here the rabbits have their " buries," and be careful 

 how you thread your way between the bushes, for the 

 ground is undermined with innumerable flint-pits long 

 abandoned. This is the favourite resort of the chats, 

 who perch on the furze or on the heaps of flints, per- 

 petually iterating their one note, from which then- 

 name seems taken. Within the enclosure of the old 

 earthwork itself the flint-diggers have been at work : 

 they occasionally find a few fragments of rusty metal, 

 doubtless relics of ancient weapons ; but little worth 

 preserving is ever found there. Such treasures are 

 much more frequently discovered in the cornfields of 

 the plain immediately beneath than here in the camp, 

 where one would naturally look for them. 



The labourers who pick up these things often put 

 an immensely exaggerated value on them : a worn 

 Roman coin of the commonest kind, of which hundreds 

 are in existence, they imagine to be worth a week's 

 wages, till after refusing its real value from a collector 

 they finally visit a watchmaker, whose aquafortis test 

 proves the supposed gold to be brass. So too with 

 fossils : a man brought me a common echinus, and 

 expected a couple of " crownds " at least for it ; 

 nothing could convince him that, although not often 

 found just in that district, in others they were numer- 

 ous. The " crownd " is still the unit, the favourite 

 coin of the labourers, especially the elder folk. They 

 use the word something in the same sense as the 

 dollar, and look with regret upon the gradual disap- 



