When King James I. threatened the recalcitrant corporation of London with the removal of the court to Oxford, the Lord Mayor, with scarcely veiled sarcasm, replied, "May it please your Majesty, of your grace, not to take away the Thames too!" If the Upper Thames awakens our admiration by its loveliness, the Lower Thames inspires us with wonder and almost awe at the boundless wealth and world-wide commerce which it bears upon its ample bosom. Other rivers may vie with it in beauty. In far-reaching influence it stands alone. As we sail through its forest of masts, or follow its course down to the sea, we feel that we are surrounded by influences which stretch to the very ends of the earth. The stream whose course we have traced from the tiny rivulet in Trewsbury Mead has become the channel of communications which, for good or evil, are affecting every nation under heaven. May He who has endowed us with such wealth and power lead us to hold them both under a deep sense of responsibility to Him who gave them!--"Then shall our peace flow like a river, and our righteousness as the waves of the sea." SOUTH-EASTERN RAMBLES [Illustration: 0046] |HE is a benefactor to his species who makes two blades of corn grow where only one grew before." The substantial truth of the aphorism none will question; vet it would be a doubtful benefit if all our waste lands were reclaimed and brought under the plough. Enclosure Acts, by extending the area of our productive soil, have increased the resources of the country and the food of the people. But the total absorption into cultivated farms of heath, forest, and woodland would be to purchase the utilitarian advantage at too high a price. The open commons of Surrey and the rolling downs of Sussex are, in their way, of a beauty unsurpassed. Both are chiefly due to the great chalk formation, which comes down in a south-westerly direction from the eastern counties, breaks into the Chiltern Hills, extends over the greater part of Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and Hampshire; and in the east of the last-named county becomes separated into two branches; one, the "North Downs," running almost due east to the North Foreland and Shakespere's Cliff; the other, the "South Downs," pursuing a south-easterly direction to Beachy Head. In their long and undulating course, they form innumerable combinations of picturesque beauty. Places elsewhere, well known and deservedly famous, are rivalled in loveliness by many a sequestered scene in the line of the lower chalk country, of which few but the thinly-scattered inhabitants, and now and then an unconventional tourist, have ever heard. [Illustration: 0048]