RYE AND EASTBOURNE 123 



present themselves freely enough for schooling, 

 you may depend upon that. Unfortunately, our 

 method is too often to warn them off their 

 natural water playgrounds. More's the pity — and 

 shame. 



Do you know that if only your eyes could 

 take a slant down the farther side of a higher 

 point, you could see Eastbourne from Brighton 

 racecourse? The quality of the light on the 

 South Downs is marvellous. Sometimes, 

 between the light and the genial balmy air it is a 

 privilege to be alive, to sit and absorb health and 

 tone by the bushel, or however you measure it. 

 Not often on a race day can you make out so 

 very much beyond the cliffs over against 

 Seaford, scraped white in making the new 

 roadway. But I have known the sight carry 

 right to the highest point of the downs looking 

 on to Eastbourne. All the same, not a trace of 

 the several towns and villages en route — 

 Ovingdean, Rottingdean, Telscombe, Newhaven, 

 Bishopstone, Seaford, and those between the 

 Ouse and Eastbourne would you see, because of 

 the hills in between. Save for an occasional 

 farm building or so, the whole territory might be 

 a deserted waste. A nice, long, droughty walk 

 that represents, to go between the two points 

 noticed, one of the most tiring I know on the 

 road, as also if you fare along the switchbacks 

 made by the chain of hills, locally the Seven 

 Sisters, but worth a score of the macadam taken 

 that way. By the road you miss the interesting 

 part of the Cuckmere haven, with its fishing 

 river, which mostly silts through the shingle bank 

 thrown up by the sea's raking. Neither do you 

 lie in the way of foregathering with the coast- 



