er. A sunken fosse and earthwork have slipped together. So lowly
are they now after these fourteen hundred years that in places the long
rough grass covers and conceals them altogether.

Down in the hollow the breeze does not come, and the bennets do not
whistle, yet gazing upwards at the vapour in the sky I fancy I can hear
the mass, as it were, of the wind going over. Standing presently at the
edge of the steep descent looking into the Weald, it seems as if the
mighty blast rising from that vast plain and glancing up the slope like
an arrow from a tree could lift me up and bear me as it bears a hawk
with outspread wings.

A mist which does not roll along or move is drawn across the immense
stage below like a curtain. There is indeed, a brown wood beneath; but
nothing more is visible. The plain is the vaster for its vague
uncertainty. From the north comes down the wind, out of the brown autumn
light, from the woods below and twenty miles of stubble. Its stratum and
current is eight hundred feet deep.

Against my chest, coming up from the plough down there (the old plough,
with the shaft moving on a framework with wheels), it hurls itself
against the green ramparts, and bounds up savagely at delay. The ears
are filled with a continuous sense of something rushing past; the
shoulders go back square; an iron-like feeling enters into the sinews.
The air goes through my coat as if it were gauze, and strokes the skin
like a brush.

The tide of the wind, like the tide of the sea, swirls about, and its
cold push at the first causes a lifting feeling in the chest--a gulp and
pant--as if it were too keen and strong to be borne. Then the blood
meets it, and every fibre and nerve is filled with new vigour. I cannot
drink enough of it. This is the north wind.

High as is the hill, there are larks yonder singing higher still,
suspended in the brown light. Turning away at last and tracing the
fosse, there is at the point where it is deepest and where there is
some trifling shelter, a flat hawthorn bush. It has grown as flat as a
hurdle, as if trained espalierwise or against a wall--the effect, no
doubt, of the winds. Into and between its gnarled branches, dry and
leafless, furze boughs have been woven in and out, so as to form a
shield against the breeze. On the lee of this natural hurdle there are
black charcoal fragments and ashes, where a fire has burnt itself out;
the stick still leans over on which was hung the vessel used a