ures at Dresden and the Louvre, and
know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be chock-full of science, not
one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis
which grows in the next wood or on the down three miles off, or what the
bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the
stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or ride of home. And so
we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and
stories by heart; and went over the fields, and woods, and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or
Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you're young cosmopolites,
belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it's all right--I
dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity,
and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of
White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away
Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the
first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said,
the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large
rich pastures, bounded by fox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow
timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where
abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself
for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the
Old Berkshire. Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know
how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him--heads high and
sterns low with a breast-high scent--can consume the ground at such
times. There being little plough-land and few woods, the vale is only an
average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are
straggling, queer,