My house at Broad Chalke stands in a narrow valley, which a little stream waters more than enough. This valley is barely a mile broad throughout its length, and in my village scarcely half so much. I can be in the hills in a quarter of an hour, and in five-and-twenty minutes find myself deeply involved, out of sight of man or his contrivances. The downs in South Wilts are nowhere lofty, and have none of the abrupt grandeur of those which guard the Sussex coast and weald; but they are of much larger extent, broader, longer, more untrodden, made much more intricate by the numberless creeks and friths which, through some dim cycle of antiquity, the sea, ebbing gradually to the great Avon delta, must have graved. Beautiful, with quiet and a solemn peacefulness of their own, they always are. They endure enormously, _in sæcula sæculorum_. Storms drive over them, mists and rains blot them out; rarely they are shrouded in a fleece of snow. In spring the clouds and the light hold races up their flanks; in summer they seem to drowse like weary monsters in the still and fervent heat. They are never profoundly affected by such changes of Nature's face; grow not awful, sharing her wrath, nor dangerously fair when she woos them with kisses to love. They are the quiet and sober spokesmen of earth, clad in Quaker greys and drabs. They show no crimson at sunset, no gilded livery at dawn. The grey deepens to cool purple, the brown glows to russet at such festal times. Early in the spring they may drape themselves in tender green, or show their sides dappled with the white of sheep. Flowers they bear, but secretly; little curious orchids, bodied like bees, eyed like spiders, flecked with the blood-drops of Attis or Adonis or some murdered shepherd-boy; pale scabious, pale cowslip, thyme that breathes sharp fragrance, "aromatic pain," as you crush it, potentilla, lady's slipper, cloudy blue milkwort, toad-flax that shows silver to the wind. Such as these they flaunt not, but wear for choiceness. You would not see them unless you knew them there. For denizens they have the hare, the fox, and the badger. Redwings, wheatears, peewits, and airy kestrels are the people of their skies.