y a thing;
And what those two have missed between 'em
I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen 'em.
Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down
Knew Old England before the Crown.
Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood
Knew Old England before the Flood.
And when you end on the Hampshire side--
Butser's old as Time and Tide.
_The Downs are sheep, the Weald is corn,
You be glad you are Sussex born!_

The Knife and the Naked Chalk

The children went to the seaside for a month, and lived in a flint
village on the bare windy chalk Downs, quite thirty miles away from
home. They made friends with an old shepherd, called Mr. Dudeney, who
had known their father when their father was little. He did not talk
like their own people in the Weald of Sussex, and he used different
names for farm things, but he understood how they felt, and let them go
with him. He had a tiny cottage about half a mile from the village,
where his wife made mead from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in
front of a coal fire, while Old Jim, who was Mr. Dudeney's sheep-dog's
father, lay at the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you
must never give a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr. Dudeney happened
to be far in the Downs, Mrs. Dudeney would tell the dog to take them to
him, and he did.

One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made the street
smell specially townified, they went to look for their shepherd as
usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the door-step and took them
in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was very slippery, and the
distances were very distant.

'It's just like the sea,' said Una, when Old Jim halted in the shade of
a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. 'You see where you're going,
and--you go there, and there's nothing between.'

Dan slipped off his shoes. 'When we get home I shall sit in the woods
all day,' he said.

'Whuff!' said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across a long
rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beef bone.

'Not yet,' said Dan. 'Where's Mr. Dudeney? Where's master?'

Old Jim looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked again.

'Don't you give it him,' Una cried. 'I'm not going to be left howling in
a desert.'

'Show, boy! Show!' said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as the palm of
your hand.

Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob of Mr.
Dudeney's hat against the sky a long way off.

'Righ