Leaving Claverham we drove along a narrow lane that ended in a fair main road, and this took us for a space alongside of the wide Laughton Level, over which sea of waving grasses, once mere marshland, is to be had perhaps the best and most comprehensive panorama of the South Downs, ranging as it does almost from Beachy Head to close upon Lewes. There before us they stretched, bare and rounded to the sky, in their long and lordly array of golden greenery fading into grey: miles and miles of glorious greenery as beheld under the summer sunshine, only broken here and there below by the pale-blue shadows of their shallow recesses. From that distance and point of view, the downs that day looked almost mountainous; it was this view that caused Gilbert White to describe the South Downs as "that majestic chain of mountains"--perhaps a somewhat exaggerated description, but serving to show how impressive the downs may appear under certain conditions, for Gilbert White was not given to employ grandiloquent language. It is the impression that a scene makes upon the traveller that profits, not the vulgar record of mere height, for there is a grandeur of form and colour as well as of size, and for grandeur of rolling form I know nothing to compare with the South Downs seen from afar. Then, rounding a spur of the hills, we descended into ancient and homely Lewes, "sweetly environ'd by the daisied downs": a town, according to Cobbett, of "clean windows and pretty faces" (I am glad that Cobbett found something during his Rural Rides to admire in his own country, for he was generally on the grumble). We left Lewes by a main road leading northwards: hemmed in as the town is by the downs, there was no other road to take except the one to Brighton, and to Brighton we were not minded to go. Presently we struck a byway to our right which brought us to Barcombe, a village of no interest; after this we found ourselves in a tree-bordered lane of the delightful Devon type, and this we followed for several winding miles.