Now mark a wonderful provision of nature. All the rain that falls along the range of chalk hills sinks in, soaks down, and might sink away to—goodness knows where, but that, beneath the chalk lies a bed of very dense clay, through which the water cannot descend, and between the chalk and the clay is strewn a narrow film of gravel, called the greensand, there hardly thicker than your hand. When the water has percolated through the chalk hills and is stopped by the clay, out it runs, on the inland scarp, through the greensand, in a thousand crystal-cool and beautiful springs, thoroughly purified by this perfect natural filter. On the inland flank of the South Downs, in a little coomb or valley scooped out of the chalk, gushed nine of these springs and fed a tarn or lake, not natural, but formed by an embankment thrown up to form a reservoir for a mill. Above this lake set in the lap of the Downs were clumps of Scotch pines, and a wood of beech, in spring full of the purple and the white scented wood orchis; on the Downs about grew the quaintly beautiful bee-orchis, rare elsewhere save on chalk. In a solitary cottage under the hill, in a shady spot where the sun rarely came, lived a widow and her daughter. The widow was very infirm, crippled with rheumatism, and was allowed eighteenpence a week and a loaf by the parish. She was too weak and helpless to earn anything for herself, and she could not have subsisted, she and her child, on eighteenpence and one loaf, had it not been for certain means of acquiring money that the neighbourhood afforded. The South Down chalk hills abound in hedgehogs. They are to be found in burrows in great numbers, and at evening, when the dew is falling, the side of the down may be seen alive with these little creatures scampering about seeking their prey. The widow’s girl, Jane, a young girl uncouth in form, with low brow and dull unintelligent eyes, was clever in finding hedgehogs, and these she carried about coiled up in a basket, and sold them to people who were troubled with slugs and snails in their gardens, or with cockroaches and black-beetles in their kitchens. She got a shilling for each hedgehog, and could, had the demand required it, have found a hedgehog _per diem_, which would have brought her in 365 shillings in the year, or £18, 5s. 0d.—a handsome income. But, unfortunately, the public were not athirst for hedgehogs; and the market was soon glutted. Consequently Jane had to seek other means of earning money. She found dormice in the woods, and as there were two large schools for boys, Hurstpierpoint and Lancing, within a walk, and in schools for boys the passion for the acquisition of dormice is insatiable, “Crazy Jane,” as the dull-witted girl was called, found that she could sell at 4d. each as many dormice as she could find. But then the dormice were only to be caught when hybernating. In summer they were too wide-awake to allow themselves to be captured.