THE SHIRE OF SHIRES 259 



potent than when the wide view rewards your climb. 

 The chalk road we walked up should be famous among 

 naturalists, for there was found a nest of the twite, which 

 rarely deigns to build so far to the South. There is some 

 quality in the place that peculiarly attracts the race of 

 finches. They rise in clouds from some of the stack 

 yards with that sudden unanimity which has persuaded 

 some observers that they possess a sixth sense. The 

 flock, however many sorts be mixed together, knows its 

 mind as if it had one mind and a hundred wings move as 

 by a single impulse. The finch is as native to the slope 

 of the down as the English juniper which seeds freely in 

 some of the hollows, and of all the bushes these are pre 

 ferred as a nesting place by the brown linnet, which has 

 always a certain affinity with the finches. How often 

 linnets* and greenfinches* nests are built side by side in 

 our gardens 1 In the mist these juniper bushes seemed 

 almost like a company of animals coming down the 

 hollow to meet you. As we stood looking at them, while 

 the red and yellow leaves fell about us with the heavy 

 deliberation belonging to a day of mist, we felt quite sure 

 that they moved. 



A certain change has come over these primeval Downs 

 of late. Plantations of fir and pine and larch have been 

 introduced and have flourished. If you see one of these 

 upon the sky line it is hardly less forbidding than the 

 motor-cycle, for the clean line of the Down exercises a 

 fascination that no one, not even Dr. Vaughan Cornish, 

 has quite explained but no lover of scenery will attempt 

 to deny. Here, as on the Stonehenge plateau, a clump of 

 beech, native to the chalk ridge, is a tower to the building, 

 magnificent in colour as in form. The alien larch and 

 pine ate more like a slate pinnacle added to a Gothic 

 building. Nevertheless, here and there the pinewood 



