it is called there, from the crests of which we seemed in an instant to
look away over half of England. Certainly I should have grown fond of such
a view as that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding
slope on the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long
ridge for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming
prospect before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next
but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so
small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from such
a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch across
the lighter green, the twelve thousand acres of Lord So-and-So's woods?
Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another
bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial
umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in
shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore
not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was
not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst
out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my
interlocutor often saw Mr. B----. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never
see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part of his
county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter for infinite
jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think," he declared, "of saying my
western hand and my eastern."

I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental attachment
for this delightful region--for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses
lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-tops of great
houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in the vague places of the
horizon, of far-away towns and sites that one had always heard of--was
conditioned upon having "property" in the neighborhood, so that the little
girls in the town should suddenly drop courtesies to me in the street;
though that too would certainly have been pleasant. At the same time,
having a little property would without doubt have made the sentiment
stronger. People who wander about the world without money have their
dreams--dreams of what they would buy if their pockets were lined. These
dreams are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighborhood
in which the wanderer happ