108 WAYFARING NOTIONS 



ye first can-non for Henry the Eight times," as 

 he would be called in the ring and in the year 

 1543. One local foundry hereabouts turned out 

 for the Earl of Cumberland forty-two cast 

 cannons of 6000 lb. each ; but no trace is left 

 except, perhaps, in an openness of country 

 suggestive of forest-clearing for fuel. Here you 

 are on a Kenty sort of hop-growing land, with 

 mighty rocks occasionally and irony sandstone to 

 be had all over the place for the getting out, to 

 build houses or make walls for ferns to grow on. 

 Away on the high ridges, fir clumps and bare 

 lands — not really bare, you know, for heather, 

 bracken, gorse, broom, stunted thorns, and heath 

 flowers grow — do remind you of Staffordshire 

 Hednesford's bleakness ; but on three other sides 

 you have farm fields and meadows richly wooded. 

 Then at the back of you is Buxted Park, adorned 

 with mighty oaks and thick pine woods, a branch 

 Ouse to water the low meads and the old, short- 

 cropped turf, telling of deer-pasturing. Deer 

 there are, too, in plenty, and other game, wood- 

 pigeons in clouds wheeling again and again over 

 the tall tree-tops before going really to roost, 

 after making-believe to settle down for the night 

 times out of number, and taking twice as long as 

 the rooks to tuck themselves up. 



The sky is clear and glowing' — at least, was 

 on the day in early December to which I refer — 

 the wind keen and clean ; for all suggestion of 

 shafts upwards or downwards, or racket of 

 machinery, or din of works, such might not be 

 and never have been. The halls' red brick might 

 have endured all its days in Holland, where the 

 new house set up yesterday and the centuries-old 

 cathedral hard by are alike to a shade in colour. 



