252 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



never existed, I could have it in my heart to hate the 

 insensate handiwork of man, to which he has given 

 an existence : the unfeeling walls of stone and flint 

 and mortar that can outlast him and the memory of 

 him by, it may well be, a thousand years. 



XXXIII 



From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great 

 chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of 

 the " deans." North and South of the Downs are two 

 different countries — so different that if they were 

 inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers 

 and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no 

 strange thing. But both are England, and not merely 

 England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a 

 wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, 

 and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter. But it is 

 a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty 

 downs, looking southward, catch and retain the heat, 

 and almost make you believe Brighton to be named 

 from its bright and lively skies, and not from that 

 very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm. 



The country of the deans is, in general, a barren 

 country. Every one knows Brighton and its neighbour- 

 hood to be places where trees are rare enough to be 

 curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are 

 hollows and shallow valleys amid the dry chalky 

 hillsides where little boscages form places for the eye, 

 tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These 

 are the deans. Very often they have been made the 

 sites of villages ; and all along this southern aspect 

 of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you will find deans 

 of various qualifications, from East Dean and West 

 Dean, by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course 

 ' Dean-ton ") near Newhaven, Rottingdean, Oving- 

 dean, Balsdean, Standean. Roedean, and the two that 

 are strung along these last miles into Brighton — 



