If I missed anything worth seeing on the way, I can only plead with Plato of old that "as it is the commendation of a good huntsman to find game in a wide wood, so it is no imputation if he hath not caught all." J. J. HISSEY. TREVIN TOWERS, EASTBOURNE. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE Different methods of travel--The old coaching days--Maps _versus_ guide-books--The fortune of the road--The South Downs--Hilly roads--The price of beauty--The sentimental traveller--A lonely farmstead--Oxen at work--A quaint old-world village 1 CHAPTER II A quiet valley--The importance of the unimportant--Moated and haunted houses--Romances in stone--A farmhouse holiday--A picture-book village--A matter of Fate--The tomb of Gibbon the historian--A gruesome happening--Upright burials--An interesting church--A curious epitaph 17 CHAPTER III An old coaching inn--The resurrection of the road--Far from anywhere--The charm of the unexpected--A historic milestone--"Mine host" of past days--Our port-wine drinking ancestors--The lure of the lane--Village life--Miniature effigy of a knight--The tomb of "the good Archbishop Leighton"--A church clerk's story 40 CHAPTER IV Dane Hill--Epitaphs--A wild bit of country--Ashdown Forest--Exploring--The use of maps--Curious inn signs--A Tudor home--The Devil's door--A medieval priest and guest house--Old-fashioned flowers--An ancient interior--Curious carvings--Roads in the old times--The window and hearth tax 59 CHAPTER V "Great-upon-Little"--The woods of Sussex--A maze of lanes--Frensham Pond--A holiday haunt--The legend of the shivering reeds--Rural inns--Roughing it(?)--Waverley Abbey--The monks of old--The sites of abbeys--Quiet country towns--Stocks and whipping-post--A curious font--"A haven of rest" 80 CHAPTER VI "Mine ease in mine inn"--King John's Castle--Greywell--Country odours--Hidden beauty-spots--The valley of the Kennett--A remote spot--Our picturesque villages--The charm of ancientness--Solitude and genius--Coate--Richard Jefferies' birthplace 100 CHAPTER VII Wootton Bassett--A quaint market-hall--Old towns--A Roman road--The spirit of the past--A pre-Elizabethan gate-house--The Royal Agricultural College--Chat with an antiquary--Norman doorways--Second-hand book catalogues--Syde--Cotswold houses--Over the Cotswolds--At a Jacobean inn 121 CHAPTER VIII The Vale of Evesham--A stormy drive--An angler's inn--A big fish--Dating from "the flood"!--Fishermen's tales--The joys of "the gentle craft"--Hotel visitors' books--A "quiet day"--Burford church and its monuments--The golden age of travel--A fine old half-timber inn--Ludlow--A Saxon doorway 141 CHAPTER IX