I have never been on Leith Hill on the day of days, nor seen the spires of forty-one churches in London, which the Ordnance Surveyors counted in 1844, nor watched a sail on the sea through Shoreham Gap. But I was once there on an August day of sunshine and cold rain and wind, and saw all the southern view in a way I should like to see it again. I came to the hill from the west by Coldharbour, and black rain brooded over all the distance to the east. To the south-east the air was clear to the Kent horizon; north-east the glass of the Crystal Palace winked in the sun. Then the rain came down over the weald to the south and the west, and the cloud rode over the fields and dotted trees like the shower of rain in Struwelpeter, blotting out the villages and the Sussex downs one by one. Then behind the cloud drove up blank blue air, and to the west Hindhead and Blackdown and hills beyond them came clean cut in a cold wind that made my eyes water; Hascombe Hill stood up dark and far, and the Hog's Back to the north of it, edged like grey paper; I was lucky to see the Hog's Back so plainly, the vendor of tea and melons at the tower told me; she had seen the sea by Shoreham Gap that morning, but often went a week without seeing the Hog's Back. Below, to the south-west, Vachery Pond lay a gold mirror; Chanctonbury Ring faithfully marked the south as the rain drew past, and I left Leith Hill with the rain cloud riding down wind like night over the weald of Kent. [Illustration: _Among the Pines._] The unsatisfactory result of climbing a hill for a view is that you must come down again. Leith Hill is better than other hills for the reason that if you come down the best way, which is eastwards, you can climb up almost as high again on the other side of the dip and walk nearly a mile in the wind at the edge of a ridge overlooking half Kent and Sussex, and then come to the prettiest village of all the Downs. Friday Street is less a village than a handful of cottages, but Coldharbour has its church and its inn, the Plough, and its scattered roofs lie on the side of a valley of green brake and red sand. Coldharbour is almost as Swiss as Friday Street, and the paint of its inn as bright white as any in the sun of the Engadine. If Friday Street lacks the cowbells, Coldharbour would be complete with the grey turbulence of snow-water. Left and right of Leith Hill are two great camps, both of them firmly linked in local legend with Caesar and the Danes, and both of them connected by history with neither. Like the camp on St. George's Hill, the camps on Anstiebury and Holmbury Hills were ancient British settlements; places of refuge where the men of the tribe left their women and children and cattle while they themselves went out with their stone-tipped arrows to find the men of other tribes. Anstiebury Camp is the larger, and covers eleven acres or so of what is now deep beechwood.