CHAPTER VI 

 A DORSET DIARY 



THE country I am writing about extends in a rough 

 semi-circle some few miles inland, with the im- 

 dulating road (half a mile behind which lies the sea, 

 breaking beneath chalk and blue lias cliffs, crowned 

 with sheep-walks and small commons) between Bridport 

 (Hardy's Port Bredy) and Lyme Regis, which is on the 

 Devonshire border, for a base. There is nothing spec- 

 tacular in the country at all. It is poorly timbered, 

 waterless and highly cultivated in the valley pastures 

 by numerous small farms. Ranges of hills, here and 

 there linked to form a miniature turf downland, grow 

 up out of the valleys in every direction. They are steep 

 but of no great height, and many of them of odd 

 rather than graceful shapes. Indeed, the only " features " 

 of the country are the cottages in its straggling villages, 

 built of Portland stone, with masterpieces of thatch, 

 and the unkempt little cider-orchards which are the 

 suburbs of every village. 



Yet I grew so intimate with this sober but cheerful 

 land, bare and lonely, but tenanted, wild but homely, 

 unambitious, but packed with character ; I came to 

 recognize every field, wayside tree and hedgerow with 

 such increasing love, that I would rather lie buried in 

 one of its untidy orchards than in Westminster Abbey. 

 The better I came to know it, the less I troubled about 

 its extrinsic beauty of appearance, any more than a 

 man does about the good looks of an old friend. I 

 learned it, I had it at my fingers' ends in every mood 

 of wet and fine, but I could no more express nor com- 

 municate what it taught me than I could endure to lose 

 it. Though I am now far away from this corner of 

 Dorset in time and place, I did leave something 



137 



