The noise makes it impossible ever quite to lose the sense of modernity in these woods, as one may on Shelley Plain, a few miles west, or at Gill's Lap, in Ashdown Forest; unless, of course, one's imagination is so complaisant as to believe it to proceed from the old iron furnaces. This reminds me that Crabbet, just to the north of Worth (where church and vicarage stand isolated on a sandy ridge on the edge of the Forest), was the home of one of the most considerable of the Sussex ironmasters, Leonard Gale of Tinsloe Forge, who bought Crabbet, park and house, in 1698--since "building," in his own words, is a "sweet impoverishing." [Sidenote: WORTH CHURCH] But we must pause for a moment at Worth, because its church is remarkable as being the largest in England to preserve its Saxon foundations. Sussex, as we have seen, is rich in Saxon relics, but the county has nothing more interesting than this. The church is cruciform, as all churches should be, and there is a little east window in the north transept through which, it is conjectured, arrows were intended to be shot at marauding Danes; for an Englishman's church was once his castle. Archæologists familiar with Worth church have been known to pass with disdain cathedrals for which the ordinary person cannot find too many fine adjectives. [Sidenote: MR. BLUNT'S BALLAD] [Sidenote: THE OLD SQUIRE] To regain Crabbet. The present owner, Mr. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, poet, patriot, and breeder of Arab horses, who is a descendant of the Gales, has a long poem entitled "Worth Forest," wherein old Leonard Gale is a notable figure. Among other poems by the lord of Crabbet is the very pleasantly English ballad of THE OLD SQUIRE. I like the hunting of the hare Better than that of the fox; I like the joyous morning air, And the crowing of the cocks. I like the calm of the early fields, The ducks asleep by the lake, The quiet hour which Nature yields Before mankind is awake. I like the pheasants and feeding things Of the unsuspicious morn; I like the flap of the wood-pigeon's wings As she rises from the corn. I like the blackbird's shriek, and his rush From the turnips as I pass by, And the partridge hiding her head in a bush, For her young ones cannot fly. I like these things, and I like to ride When all the world is in bed, To the top of the hill where the sky grows wide, And where the sun grows red. The beagles at my horse heels trot, In silence after me; There's Ruby, Roger, Diamond, Dot, Old Slut and Margery,-- A score of names well used, and dear, The names my childhood knew; The horn, with which I rouse their cheer, Is the horn my father blew. I like the hunting of the hare Better than that of the fox; The new world still is all less fair Than the old world it mocks.