8 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



ease. But the South is tender and will harbour any one; 

 her quiet people resent intrusion quietly, so that many 

 do not notice the resentment. These are the " home " 

 counties. A man can hide away in them. The people 

 are not hospitable, but the land is. 



Yet there are days and places which send us in search 

 of another kind of felicity than that which dwells under 

 the Downs, when, for example, the dark wild of Ash- 

 down or of Woolmer, some parcel of heathery land, with 

 tufted pines and pale wandering roads, rises all dark and 

 stormy out of the gentle vale, or on such an evening as 

 when the sky is solemn blue save at the horizon where it 

 is faint gold, and between the blue and the gold, across the 

 north-west, lies an ashen waste of level cloud. This sky 

 and its new moon and evening star below, is barred by 

 the boles of beeches; through them the undulations of 

 deserted ploughland are all but white with dewy grass 

 and weed. Underfoot winds a disused path amid almost 

 overlapping dog's mercury. The earth is like an 

 exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the 

 great act in the sky. Suddenly a dog-fox barks — with 

 melancholy and malice in the repeated hoarse yells — a 

 sound that awakens the wildest past out of the wood and 

 the old path. He passes by me at a trot, pausing a little 

 to bark. He vanishes, but not his voice, into the wood, 

 and he returns, still barking, and passes me again, filling 

 the wood and the coombe below with a sound that has 

 nothing to match it except that ashen waste in the beech- 

 barred, cold blue and golden sky, against which the fox 

 is carved in moving ebony. Or again, when a rude dark 

 headland rises out of the mist of the plain into the evening 



