304 WITHIN AN HOUR OF LONDON TOWN. 



district I know well, but if it is seen just here, it is 

 only when they are flying over. Certain districts 

 are avoided by animals and birds, for reasons known 

 to themselves only. 



Once more we enter the firs, but this time it 

 proves too much for us, though we fancy we can 

 put up with something. The late Charles Kingsley 

 found the same thing happen to him once. What 

 we at a distance thought solid ground, proves to be a 

 tussocky, or, as it is called here, a hummocky grass 

 swamp, with firs growing over it. Disreputable 

 objects the trees are, covered with the longest 

 trailing grey moss I have ever seen. Even the 

 sickly, spindly seedlings that had somehow managed 

 to struggle through the tussocks are draped with it. 

 If you caught up a great bunch, and pulled at it with 

 both hands, you would pull up the knob of peat-soil 

 that it grew on with it. We try this and in flows 

 the water between all the hummocks, water the 

 colour of coffee. 



How many gripes we jump or blunder over 

 through that abominable grass I am not able to 

 say. We get lost in it. Places that we had not 



