Side by side with this, in a sense, dim and doubtful people, you find the unmistakable Saxon, the thick-set, {228} heavy-looking, round-headed man with blue eyes and light hair, and heavy drooping mustachios--a sort of terrestrial walrus who goes erect. He is not abundant as in Sussex, but is represented in almost any village, and in these villages he is always like a bull-dog or bull-terrier among hounds, lurchers, and many other varieties, including curs of low degree. Mentally, he is rather a dull dog, at all events deficient in the finer, more attractive qualities. Leaving aside the spiritual part, he is a good all-round man, tough and stubborn, one that the naturalist may have no secret qualms about in treating as an animal. A being of strong animal nature, and too often in this brewer-ridden county a hard drinker. A very large proportion of the men in rural towns and villages with blotchy skins and watery or beery eyes are of this type. Even more offensive than the animality, the mindlessness, is that flicker of conscious superiority which lives in their expression. It is, I fancy, a survival of the old instinctive feeling of a conquering race amid the conquered. [Sidenote: Reversion of type] Nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but here in Hampshire I cannot but think that this type, in spite of its very marked characters, is a very much muddied and degenerate form. One is led to this conclusion by occasionally meeting with an individual whose whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the mind with a kind of astonishment, and one can only exclaim--there is nothing else to say--Here Nature has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure unadulterated form! Such a {229} type I came upon one summer day on the high downs east of the Itchen.