My road led me a little inland, for I avoided the tourist-haunted one that winds over Beachy Head, that grand headland that rises so sheer, white, and commandingly above the sounding sea. Would one could behold it in its ancient seclusion! Such spots demand solitude, or they cease to be impressive. "The fatal gift of fame" has been the headland's undoing, aided by its proximity to a fashionable watering-place, and the crowd it attracts from early morning till the sun is setting. They even sell picture post-cards there and bottled ginger-beer! Need more be said? Yet I recently read an article in a London paper upon "The Pleasant Solitude of Beachy Head." Was it written in Fleet Street, I wonder? All the roads over the downs are hilly ones; they are for ever either ascending or descending; their gradients are generally fairly severe, and their surfaces none of the best. Now and then you come upon a comparatively level stretch, but not for long. So we soon began a long descent, only to climb steeply again and to find ourselves on a wind-swept height with a tiny flint-built church crowning the topmost ridge of it. Friston church it was marked on our map--an unpretending building, yet not wanting in dignity, and simple dignity is a rare quality, as delightful as it is rare. Even some city-surrounded cathedrals do not attain it. Doubtless its elevated and lonely position gave the humble little fane a certain poetic charm, for it is not only the building but its place in the prospect that affects the observer. Stonehenge in a farm field, away from the wild and open plain that surrounds it, would lose much of its impressiveness; it has lost some of it already by being railed in. A castle in a hollow, as many were built to secure the services of a moat, is not the same to the eye as a castle boldly dominating the landscape from some overhanging crag. Bodiam's ruined Castle, set in a wooded valley, is beautiful but not impressive; on the other hand, Carreg Cennin Castle in South Wales, though inferior in size and much poorer a ruin, is singularly impressive, standing as it does isolated on the top of a perpendicular precipice of rock. That is the sort of castle I pictured to myself and used to draw in fancy when I was a boy.