Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the happy hours we lay Deep in fern on Airly Beacon, Courting through the summer's day! Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the weary haunt for me, All alone on Airly Beacon, With his baby on my knee! Of other writers, Mr. Baring-Gould has come nearest to catching the spirit of the moorlands and the breeze that sometimes drifts up over Hindhead from the great glen which local myth has named the Devil's Punch Bowl. The _Broom Squire_ is strangely unsatisfactory as a novel, or I find it so, with its entire needlessness and inconsequence of plot. But it has something in it of the heather and the wind, of the sand of Thursley and the steam of the Punch Bowl on a wet day; and you may still meet broom squires if you like to wander down into the deep of the glen. The best broom squire is, I think, Kingsley's, in _My Winter Garden_:-- "The clod of these parts is the descendant of many generations of broom squires and deer stealers; the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the Queen's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life 'hits the keeper into the river,' and reconsiders himself for a while over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults, and I have mine. But he is a thoroughly good fellow nevertheless. Civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; a far shrewder fellow too--owing to his dash of wild forest blood from gipsy, highwayman, and what not--than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South Saxon of the chalk downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth: but when he grows old a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince...." [Illustration: _The Devil's Punch Bowl, from Gibbet Hill._]