32O LIFE AT DOWN. JET AT. 33-45. 



with the main lines of traffic, only by stony tortuous lanes, 

 may well have been enabled to preserve its retired character. 

 Nor is it hard to believe in the smugglers and their strings 

 of pack-horses making their way up from the lawless old 

 villages of the Weald, of which the memory still existed 

 when my father settled in Down. The village stands on 

 solitary upland country, 500 to 600 feet above the sea, a 

 country with little natural beauty, but possessing a certain 

 charm in the shaws, or straggling strips of wood, capping the 

 chalky banks and looking down upon the quiet ploughed 

 lands of the valleys. The village, of three or four hundred 

 inhabitants, consists of three small streets of cottages meeting 

 in front of the little flint-built church. It is a place where 

 new-comers are seldom seen, and the names occurring far 

 back in the old church registers are still well known in the 

 village. The smock-frock is not yet quite extinct, though 

 chiefly used as a ceremonial dress by the " bearers " at 

 funerals ; but as a boy I remember the purple or green 

 smocks of the men at church. 



The house stands a quarter of a mile from the village, 

 and is built, like so many houses of the last century, 

 as near as possible to the road a narrow lane winding 

 away to the Westerham high-road. In 1842, it was dull 

 and unattractive enough : a square brick building of three 

 storeys, covered with shabby whitewash and hanging tiles. 

 The garden had none of the shrubberies or walls that 

 now give shelter ; it was overlooked from the lane, and was 

 open, bleak, and desolate. One of my father's first under- 

 takings was to lower the lane by about two feet, and to build 

 a flint wall along that part of it which bordered the garden. 

 The earth thus excavated was used in making banks and 

 mounds round the lawn : these were planted with evergreens, 

 which now give to the garden its retired and sheltered 

 character. 



The house was made to look neater by being covered with 



