Mr. Kipling, as I have said, has now removed his household gods farther
inland, to Burwash, but his heart and mind must be still among the
Downs. The Burwash country, good as it is, can (I think) never inspire
him to such verse as he wrote in _The Five Nations_ on the turf hills
about his old home:--

No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn--
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And through the gaps revealed
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim
Blue goodness of the Weald.

Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou'west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel's leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales--
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails,
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies--
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and salty days
The unshaded silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the Hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart.

[Sidenote: WHEATEARS]

Of old the best wheatear country was above Rottingdean; but the South
Down shepherds no longer have the wheatear money that used to add so
appreciably to their wages in the summer months. A combination of
circumstances has brought about this loss. One is the decrease in
wheatears, another the protection of the bird by law, and a third the
refusal of the farmers to allow their men any longer to neglect the
flocks by setting and tending snares. But in the seventeenth, eighteenth
and early part of the nineteenth centuries, wheatears were taken on the
Downs in enormous quantities