d that can beat it, and while the valleys and plains are now
almost wholly worked with factory-made ploughs, the South Downs are
cultivated with the ploughs made in the villages by the wheelwrights. A
wheelwright is generally regularly employed by two or three farms, which
keep him in constant work. There is not, perhaps, another home-made
implement of old English agriculture left in use; certainly, none at
once so curious and interesting, and, when drawn by oxen, so thoroughly
characteristic.

Under the September sun, flowers may still be found in sheltered places,
as at the side of furze, on the highest of the Downs. Wild thyme
continues to bloom--the shepherd's thyme--wild mignonette, blue
scabious, white dropwort, yellow bedstraw, and the large purple blooms
of greater knapweed. Here and there a blue field gentian is still in
flower; "eggs and bacon" grow beside the waggon tracks. Grasshoppers hop
among the short dry grass; bees and humble-bees are buzzing about, and
there are places quite bright with yellow hawkweeds.

The furze is everywhere full of finches, troops of them; and there are
many more swallows than were flying here a month since. No doubt they
are on their way southwards, and stay, as it were, on the edge of the
sea while yet the sun shines. As the evening falls the sheep come slowly
home to the fold. When the flock is penned some stand panting, and the
whole body at each pant moves to and fro lengthways; some press against
the flakes till the wood creaks; some paw the dry and crumbling ground
(arable), making a hollow in which to lie down.

Rooks are fond of the places where sheep have been folded, and perhaps
that is one of the causes why they so continually visit certain spots in
particular fields to the neglect of the rest.

THE BREEZE ON BEACHY HEAD

The waves coming round the promontory before the west wind still give
the idea of a flowing stream, as they did in Homer's days. Here beneath
the cliff, standing where beach and sand meet, it is still; the wind
passes six hundred feet overhead. But yonder, every larger wave rolling
before the breeze breaks over the rocks; a white line of spray rushes
along them, gleaming in the sunshine; for a moment the dark rock-wall
disappears, till the spray sinks.

The sea seems higher than the spot where I stand, its surface on a
higher level--raised like a green mound--as if it could burst in and
occupy the space up to the foot of the cliff in a