plantations. The wood runs in
ridges, so that whichever way you want to go you cannot keep an
objective in sight. Missel thrushes clatter up from the open spaces;
jays bark in the birches, angry at an intrusion. Except for them the
silence, in a silent month like July or August, is profound.

When I was in Hurt Wood I wanted to walk from the windmill to Farley
Heath, two and a-half miles as the crow flies, nearer five miles as I
walked it. The perplexing thing is the number of disused rides and paths
in the wood. They cross each other perpetually at right angles, like
lines on a chessboard, and if you are walking diagonally across them the
temptation is to a succession of knights' moves which end in wrong
places. I followed one of these rides a long way, and the wood grew
thicker and thicker; suddenly it ended, and I found myself in a
clearing, with the loneliest little cottage in the corner, guarded by a
huge black retriever in an iron kennel; a woman was drawing water by the
door. Where was I, could she tell me? Where did I want to go to? she
asked in reply--probably the right answer.

Farley Heath is one of the few well-defined stations of a Roman camp in
the county. Mr. William Watson, writing in the shade of the Emperor Yew
by Newlands Corner, thought of the Roman legionaries encamped on Farley
Heath below the downs, and one of the finest passages in the poem he
made there belongs half to the yew and half to Farley:--

Nay, hid by thee from Summer's gaze
That seeks in vain this couch of loam,
I should behold, without amaze,
Camped on yon down the hosts of Rome,
Nor start though English woodlands heard
The selfsame mandatory word

As by the Cataracts of the Nile
Marshalled the legions long ago,
Or where the lakes are one blue smile
'Neath pageants of Helvetian snow,
Or 'mid the Syrian sands that lie
Sick of the day's great tearless eye,

Or on barbaric plains afar,
Where, under Asia's fevering ray,
The long lines of imperial war
O'er Tigris passed, and with dismay
In fanged and iron deserts found
Embattled Persia closing round,

And 'mid their eagles watched on high
The vultures gathering for a feast,
Till, from the quivers of the sky,
The gorgeous star-flight of the East
Flamed, and the bow of darkness bent
O'er Julian dying in his tent.

Between Farley Heath and Chilworth Station, which