Sussex, especially near the coast, is naturally a good nightingale country. Many of the birds, pausing there after their long journey at the end of April, do not fly farther, but make their home where they first alight. I know of one meadow and copse under the north escarpment of the Downs where three nightingales singing in rivalry in a triangle (the perfect condition) can be counted upon in May, by night, and often by day too, as surely as the rising and setting of the sun. But in St. Leonard's Forest the nightingale never sings. American visitors who, as Mr. John Burroughs once did, come to England in the spring to hear the nightingale, must remember this. CHAPTER XIV WEST GRINSTEAD, COWFOLD AND HENFIELD "The Rape of the Lock"--Knepp castle--The Cowfold brass--Carthusians in Sussex--The Oakendene cricketers--Fourteen Golden Orioles on Henfield common--A Henfield botanist--Dr. Thomas Stapleton's merits--A good epitaph--Sussex humour. West Grinstead is perhaps the most remarkable of the villages on the line from Horsham to Steyning, by reason of its association with literature, _The Rape of the Lock_ having been to a large extent composed beneath a tree in the park. Yet as one walks through this broad expanse of brake-fern, among which the deer are grazing, with the line of the Downs, culminating in Chanctonbury Ring, in view, it requires a severe effort to bring the mind to the consideration of Belinda's loss and all the surrounding drama of the toilet and the card table. If there is one thing that would not come naturally to the memory in West Grinstead park, it is the poetry of Pope. The present house, the seat of the Burrells, was built in 1806. It was in the preceding mansion that John Caryll, Pope's friend, made his home, moving hither from West Harting, as we have seen. Caryll suggested to Pope the subject of _The Rape of the Lock_, the hero of which was his cousin, Lord Petre. The line:-- This verse to Caryll, Muse, is due, is the poet's testimony and thanks. John Gay, who found life a jest, has also walked amid the West Grinstead bracken. West Grinstead church is isolated in the fields, a curiously pretty and cheerful building, with a very charming porch and a modest shingled spire rising from its midst. Brasses to members of the Halsham family are within, and a monument to Captain Powlett, whose unquiet ghost, hunting without a head, we have just met. Hard by the church is one of the most attractive and substantial of the smaller manor houses of Sussex, square and venerable and well-roofed with Horsham stone.