Ill] HERTFORD: HOME OF MY BOYHOOD 41 



Our ushers were not melancholy men, but sometimes one 

 of them would bring a book to read while we played, and this 

 was sufficient to carry out the resemblance to the poem, and 

 summon up to my imagination this charming spot whenever 

 I read it. 



In one corner of this field there was a rather deep circular 

 hole, from which chalk was brought up as a top-dressing for 

 some of the poor gravel soil, and this was one of the instances 

 which led me to the belief that chalk was always somewhere 

 underground. In this field I was once told that a wonderful 

 plant, the bee-orchis, was sometimes found, and my father 

 used to talk of it as a great rarity. Once, during the time 

 we lived at Hertford, some one showed us the flower, and I 

 remember looking at it as something so strange as to be 

 almost uncanny, but as I never found one myself I did not 

 think more of it. 



Just over the boundary wall of our school playground, 

 and continuing along the side of the churchyard, and then 

 across the fields for a long distance southward, was a dry, 

 irregular ditch or channel cut in the gravel by flood-water 

 after heavy rains. In places this would be very deep — six or 

 eight feet or more, in others shallow, and in some places there 

 were vertical drops where regular little waterfalls occurred 

 after storms. The whole appearance of this channel was 

 very strange and mysterious, as there was nothing like it 

 anywhere else. We called it the Gulps or Gulphs, but it is 

 now marked on the ordnance maps as Hag's Dell, showing 

 that it was looked upon as a mysterious phenomenon by 

 those who gave it the name. This also was a kind of play- 

 ground, and we sometimes spent a whole afternoon wandering 

 about it. In the neighbourhood of Morgan's Walk, however, 

 there were many interesting spots, among others, some old 

 hedgerows which had been so undermined in a chalky slope 

 as to form complete overhanging caves, one of which I and 

 two of my companions made our own, and stored it with a 

 few necessaries, such as bits of candle, a tinder-box with flint- 

 steel and matches, and a few provisions, such as potatoes, 

 which we could roast in our fire, and play at being brigands. 



