50 Wild Lifein a Southern County. 
mouths of the hollows, close to the hedge, the great 
flint stones and lumps of chalky rubble rolling down 
from above one by one in the passage of the years 
have accumulated: so that the turf there is almost 
hidden as by a stony cascade. 
On the ridge here is a thicket of furze, grown 
shrub-like and strong, being untouched by woodman’s 
tool; here the rabbits have their ‘buries,’ and be 
careful how you thread your way between the bushes, 
for the ground is undermined with innumerable flint- 
pits long abandoned. This is the favourite resort of 
the chats, who perch on the furze or on the heaps of 
flints, perpetually iterating their one note, from which 
their name seemstaken. Within the enclosure of the 
old earthwork itself the flint-diggers have been at 
work: they occasionally find a few fragments of rusty 
metal, doubtless relics of ancient weapons ; but little 
worth preserving is ever found there, Such treasures 
are much more frequently discovered in the corn-fields 
of the plain immediately beneath than here in the 
camp where one would naturally look for them. 
The labourers who pick up these things often put 
an immensely exaggerated value on them: a worn 
Roman coin of the commonest kind, of which hundreds 
are in existence, they imagine to be worth a week’s 
wages till after refusing its réal value from a collector 
they finally visit a watchmaker whose aquafortis test 
proves the supposed gold to be brass. So, too, with 
fossils : a man brought me a common echinus, and 
