e lays buried in de church-aird
over yender--leastways so I've heerd my wife's mother say, under de
bank jest where de bed of snow-draps grows."

[Sidenote: FAIRY RINGS AND DEW PONDS]

All who know the Downs must know the fairies' or Pharisees' rings, into
which one so often steps. Science gives them a fungoid origin, but
Shakespeare, as well as Master Fowington's grandmother, knew that Oberon
and Titania's little people alone had the secret. Further proof is to be
found in the testimony of John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary, who
records that Mr. Hart, curate at Yatton Keynel in 1633-4, coming home
over the Downs one night witnessed with his own eyes an "innumerable
quantitie of pigmies" dancing round and round and singing, "making all
manner of small, odd noises."

A word ought to have been said of the quiet and unexpected dew-ponds of
the Downs, upon which one comes so often and always with a little
surprise. Perfect rounds they are, reflecting the sky they are so near
like circular mirrors set in a white frame. Gilbert White, who was
interested in all interesting things, mentions the unfailing character
of a little pond near Selborne, which "though never above three feet
deep in the middle, and not more than thirty feet in diameter, ... yet
affords drink for three hundred or four hundred sheep, and for at least
twenty head of cattle beside." He then asks, having noticed that in May,
1775, when the ponds of the valley were dry, the ponds of the hills were
still "little affected," "have not these elevated pools some unnoticed
recruits, which in the night-time counterbalance the waste of the day?"
The answer, which White supplies, is that the hill pools are recruited
by dew. "Persons," he writes, "that are much abroad, and travel early
and late, such as shepherds, fishermen, &c., can tell what prodigious
fogs prevail in the night on elevated downs, even in the hottest part of
summer; and how much the surfaces of things are drenched by those
swimming vapours, though, to the senses, all the while, little moisture
seems to fall."

Kingsley has a passage on the same subject in his essay, "The
Air-Mothers"--"For on the high chalk downs, you know, where farmers make
a sheep pond, they never, if they are wise, make it in the valley or on
a hillside, but on the bleakest top of the very highest down; and there,
if they can once get it filled with snow and rain in winter, the blessed
dews of night will keep some water in it