De
Tribus Luminibus Romanorum_, and for some time was not found out. His
controversies were chiefly with Bentley, who perhaps was as arrogant as
Middleton was greedy.

Hascombe Hill is the eastern of three hills which stand in a triangle
round the north of the Fold Country. Highdown Ball is the centre of the
three, fifty feet lower than Hascombe Hill, which is 644 feet; but
Highdown Ball somehow seems the higher of the two. A strange little
rhyme, or riddle, belongs to the hill:--

"On Hydon's top there is a cup,
And in that cup there is a drop:
Take up the cup and drink the drop,
And place the cup on Hydon's top."

The third hill is Hambledon's. The village is dotted over the hill and
at its foot; the church is perched on the very top, and it is worth
climbing the hill to look at the pair of yew trees in the churchyard.
One of them cannot be much smaller than the Crowhurst yew itself. Like
that monarch of trees, it is hollow; unlike it, it has not yet been
damaged by man in order to protect it from the weather.

Hambledon is best approached from Chiddingfold through Hambledon Hurst,
a stretch of cool woodland. A tiny path leaves the main road over a
strip of grass and brambles, dives into an oakwood and emerges at the
end of a long straight open ride of grass, edged and shaded by oak
trees, green, smooth and silent. Into such open glades dark fallow deer
should come, and roedeer dancing out from the shadows to listen and
snuff. If bearded men with jewelled feathers and crimson cloaks rode
across the patches of sunlight, it would be nothing strange in that deep
wood. The illusion of virgin solitude is perfect. Yet the green ride was
once the main road south from Godalming through Hambledon to Chichester.

I ought not to leave the Fold Country without mentioning the
Chiddingfold foxhounds, a pack which hunts the country south of
Guildford to the borders of Lord Leconfield's Hunt in Sussex. It is poor
riding, for there is too much woodland, and on the heather there is
hardly any jumping. "The prettier the country the poorer the hunting,"
Mr. Charles Richardson quotes in writing of the Chiddingfold foxhounds:
perhaps one might add that in a poor country there can be some pretty
hunting.

[Illustration: _Black Down, from Hambledon._]

CHAPTER XV

CRANLEIGH AND EWHURST

A coffee-pot yew--Vachery Pond--The osprey as a guest--Baynards and
its ghost--Ewhurst--A pet lamb--Children and a