ous, and we had driven through lanes perfumed by the
fresh green birch, with its bark silvery and many-tinted, and over
commons where the very air was loaded with the heavy fragrance of the
furze, an odour resembling in richness its golden blossoms, just as
the scent of the birch is cool, refreshing, and penetrating, like the
exquisite colour of its young leaves, until we reached the top of the
hill, where, on one side, the enclosed wood, where the lilies grow, sank
gradually, in an amphitheatre of natural terraces, to a piece of water
at the bottom; whilst on the other, the wild open heath formed a sort of
promontory overhanging a steep ravine, through which a slow and sluggish
stream crept along amongst stunted alders, until it was lost in the deep
recesses of Lidhurst Forest, over the tall trees of which we literally
looked down. We had come without a servant; and on arriving at the gate
of the wood with neither human figure nor human habitation in sight, and
a high-blooded and high-spirited horse in the phaeton, we began to feel
all the awkwardness of our situation. My companion, however, at length
espied a thin wreath of smoke issuing from a small clay-built hut
thatched with furze, built against the steepest part of the hill, of
which it seemed a mere excrescence, about half way down the declivity;
and, on calling aloud, two children, who had been picking up dry stumps
of heath and gorse, and collecting them in a heap for fuel at the door
of their hovel, first carefully deposited their little load, and then
came running to know what we wanted.

If we had wondered to see human beings living in a habitation, which,
both for space and appearance, would have been despised by a pig of any
pretension, as too small and too mean for his accommodation, so we were
again surprised at the strange union of poverty and content evinced
by the apparel and countenances of its young inmates. The children,
bareheaded and barefooted, and with little more clothing than one
shabby-looking garment, were yet as fine, sturdy, hardy, ruddy, sunburnt
urchins, as one should see on a summer day. They were clean, too: the
stunted bit of raiment was patched, but not ragged; and when the girl,
(for, although it was rather difficult to distinguish between the
brother and sister, the pair were of different sexes,) when the
bright-eyed, square-made, upright little damsel clasped her two brown
hands together, on the top of her head, pressed down her