SPRING 59 



that the South Country seems a dense forest from east 

 to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of 

 level ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, 

 and between them and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes 

 furzy; on the other, oaks and beeches sacred to the 

 pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers among the 

 hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The Eng- 

 lish game preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and 

 however precious, it has only one or two defenders easily 

 eluded and, when met, most courteous to all but children 

 and not very well dressed women. The burglar's must 

 be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures 

 of the trespasser's unskilled labour. 



In the middle of the wood is a four-went way, and the 

 grassy or white roads lead where you please among tall 

 beeches or broad, crisp-leaved shining thorns and brief 

 open spaces given over to the mounds of ant and mole, 

 to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims' Way, 

 in the valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and 

 hazel, sometimes over whin and whinberry and heather 

 and sand, but looking up at the yews and beeches of the 

 chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight clear 

 waters — a woodland church — woods of the willow wren 

 — and then, upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest 

 mead rippled up to its walls by but few graves, another 

 church, dark, squat, small-windowed, old, and from its 

 position above the world having the characters of church 

 and beacon and fortress, calling for all men's reverence. 

 Up here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads 

 behind, wiped out as if writ in water, or worn deep and 

 then deserted and surviving only as tunnels under the hazels. 



