It was pleasant to return from a ramble over the rough heather to the shade of the green village lanes, to stand aside in some deep narrow road to make room for a farmer's waggon to pass, drawn by five or six ponderous horses; to meet the cows too, smelling of milk and new-mown hay, attended by the small cow-boy. One notices in most rural districts how stunted in growth many of the boys of the labourers are; here I was particularly struck by it on account of the fine physique of many of the young men. It is possible that the growing time may be later and more rapid here than in most places. Some of the young men are exceptionally tall, and there was a larger percentage of tall handsome women than I have seen in any village in Surrey and Hampshire. But the children were almost invariably too small for their years. The most stunted specimen was a little boy I met near Hindhead. He was thin, with a dry wizened face, and looked at the most about eight years old; he assured me that he was twelve. I engaged this gnome-like creature to carry something for me, and we had three or four miles ramble together. A curious couple we must have seemed--a giant and a pigmy, the pigmy looking considerably older than the giant. He was a heath-cutter's child, the eldest of seven children! They were very poor, but he could earn nothing himself, except by gathering whortleberries in their season; then he said, all seven of them turned out with their parents, the youngest in its mother's arms. I questioned him about the birds of the district; he stoutly maintained that he recognised only four, and proceeded to name them. "Here is another," said I, "a fifth you didn't name, singing in the bushes half a dozen yards from where we stand--the best singer of all." "I did name it," he returned, "that's a thrush." It was a nightingale, a bird he did not know. But he knew a thrush--it was one of the four birds he knew, and he stuck to it that it was a thrush singing. Afterwards he pointed out the squalid-looking cottage he lived in. It was on the estate of a great lady. "Tell me," I said, "is she much liked on the estate?" He pondered the question for a few moments, then replied, "Some likes her and some don't," and not a word more would he say on that subject. A curious amalgam of stupidity and shrewdness; a bad observer of bird-life, but a cautious little person in answering leading questions; he was evidently growing up (or not doing so) in the wrong place.