was--that ran through a copse about half a mile from the school. It was
on Farmer Dawson's land, down in the hollow of the valley, up one side
of which lay his big range of hop-gardens.

The Doctor paid him a certain rent for the right of the boys going down
to this place, where a great dam had been built up of clay and clinkers.
It was not all new, but done up afresh after lying a couple of hundred
years or so untouched. All round it, Farmer Dawson used to send his men
in the winter to cut down the coppice, trimming the ash and eating
chestnut trees down to the stumps to make the young growth into
hop-poles; but when the Doctor offered to take it and repair the dam,
the hop-poles were left to grow and form a beautiful screen round this
dell.

I remember what interest we boys took in it during one winter, when the
Doctor had set a lot of men who were out of work to dig and wheel the
clinkers and clay, a barrowful of one, and then a barrowful of the
other, along the dam; and with old Lomax to give orders, we all marched
and counter-marched in our thickest boots over the top of the dam, to
trample it all down strong and firm.

You will think, perhaps, that it was easy enough to get clay, and so it
was, for a thick bed lay only a few yards from the stream; but what
about the clinkers?

I'll tell you. There was quite a mine of them, hard, shiny fragments,
some of which had run just like so much black or brown glass.

How did they get there, looking like so much volcanic slag? Why, they
were the refuse from a huge iron furnace that used to be in full blast
in the days of Queen Elizabeth or King James, and the dam we were
repairing, after it had been grown over with trees, and the water
reduced to a little stream, belonged to one of the old hammer ponds
whose waters were banked up to keep a sufficiency to turn the big wheel
that worked the tilt-hammers and perhaps blew the iron furnace till it
roared.

For that peaceful rural part of Sussex was in those days a big forest,
whose wood was cut down and made into charcoal. The forest is gone, and
only represented now by patches of copsewood saved for cutting down
every ten years or so for poles; but the iron lies there still in great
veins or beds, though it is no longer dug out, the iron of to-day being
found and smelted north and west, where coal-pits are handy; and the
ironmasters of Sussex, whose culverins and big guns were famous all the
world round, have given