he country legends,
the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And
so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and
stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or
Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you're young cosmopolites,
belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it's all right; I
dare say it is. This is the day of large views, and glorious humanity,
and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of
White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away
Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the
first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the
Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich
pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber,
with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor
Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and
miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire.
Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the
stanch little pack who dash after him--heads high and sterns low, with
a breast-high scent--can consume the ground at such times. There being
little ploughland, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting
country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer,
old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least
regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy
lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built
chiefly of good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the
last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is
beginning to m