e high-road.

On all sides, as already intimated at the opening of this tale, the
sandy commons near Thursley are furrowed as though a giant plough
had been drawn along them, but at so remote a period that since the
soil was turned the heather had been able to cast its deep brown
mantle of velvet pile over every irregularity, and to veil the scars
made in the surface.

These gullies or furrows vary in depth from ten to forty feet, and
run to various lengths. They were the subaerial excavations and
open adits made by miners in quest of iron ore. They are probably
of all dates from prehistoric antiquity to the reign of the Tudors,
after which the iron smelting of the weald came to an end. The
magnificent oaks of the forest of Anderida that stretched from
Winchelsea, in Kent, a hundred and twenty miles west, with a breadth
of thirty miles between the northern and southern chalk downs--these
oaks had been hewn down and used as fuel, in the fabrication of
military armor and weapons, and just as the wood was exhausted,
coal was discovered in the north, and the entire industry of iron
in the weald came to an end.

Mehetabel had often run up these gullies when a child, playing on
the commons with Iver, or with other scholars of Dame Chivers
school.

She remembered now that in one of these she and Iver had discovered
a cave, scooped out in the sandrock, possibly the beginning of an
adit, probably a place for storing smuggled goods. On a very small
scale it resembled the extraordinary labyrinth of subterranean
passages at Puttenham, that may be explored at the present day.
During the preceding century and the beginning of that in which we
live, an extensive business in smuggled spirits, tea, and tobacco
was carried on from the coast to the Thames; and there were certain
store places, well-known to the smugglers in the line of trade. In
Thursley parish is a farm that is built over vast vaults, carefully
constructed, with the entrance of them artfully disguised. The
Puttenham labyrinth has its openings in a dense coppice; and it had
this advantage, that with a few strokes of the pick a passage could
be blocked with sand from the roof.

The cave that Mehetabel had discovered, and in which she had spent
many a summer hour, opened out of the side of one of the most
profound of the trenches cut in the surface after ore. The entrance
was beneath a projecting slab of ironstone, and was concealed by
bushes of furze and bramble. It