Perhaps broom squires belong more properly to Thursley and the moors. They are a disappearing race, and I have met few of them. But their cottages, some of then mantled with ivy, some of them broken and tumbling, some empty altogether, stand along the slopes of Highcombe Bottom, which is the glen of the Punch Bowl, and dot themselves here and there by the sandy lanes to the north. Compared with the loneliness of some of these lanes, the wildest tract of Hindhead is a garden. The flowerless, silent shade of a lane by Highcombe Bottom in August, when no birds are singing, is the most solitary thing in the countryside. But on Hindhead there is always wild life moving. I have seen strange visitors there; as strange as any were a brood of pheasants, almost on the highest ridge. Or perhaps even odder hill-dwellers are the tadpoles which swarm in the summer in the little pools on the highest ridge itself. What should frogs be doing on Hindhead? Perhaps they are toads. But the happiest and the most graceful of all living things on Hindhead are the swifts. To me, indeed, they are a part of the place; they belong to that hot clear air over the height of the downs, to the sense of immense distance of green fields spread south to Chanctonbury Ring and north to Nettlebed by Henley. I never think of Hindhead without two sights of summer; of children wandering over the hillside with their lips stained with bilberries; and the swifts sailing in royal circles high in the blue or screaming in pursuing companies, close and low over the roadway down the hill. [Illustration: _The Post Office, Churt._] [Illustration: _The Red Lion, Thursley._] CHAPTER XIII THURSLEY AND THE MOORS Painters among heather.--The Devil's Jumps.--The Devil redivivus.--Cobbett at Thursley.--A superb belfry.--The Sailor's Grave.--Pig-iron and hammers.--The natterjack at eve.--A plank for bellringers.--Witley fifty years hence.--Mehetabel in the church. Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.