But there is no way through Windlecombe. From the market town four miles off, the road is good enough; and good it remains until it reaches the highest human outpost of the village. But there it suddenly changes to a mere cart-track, soon to vanish altogether in the green sward of the Down. And therein lies Windlecombe’s chiefest blessing. Far away on the great main road, when the wind is southerly, we can hear the motor-bugles calling, and see pale comet-beams careering through the night. But these things come no nearer. At rare intervals, perhaps, a stray juggernaut will descend upon us, and demand of some placid rustic the nearest way to Land’s End or Aberdeen, returning disgusted on its tracks when it learns that there is only one road from here to anywhere, and that the road it came. But these ear-splitting, malodorous happenings are few and far between. At all other times, Windlecombe wears the quiet of the hills about it like a garment. The dust of the highway has no soaring ambition to whiten the hedgerows, or fill the cottagers’ cabbages with grit. It still keeps to its ancient, lowly work of smoothing the path for man and beast; and our children can play in it unterrorised, our old dogs lie in it at their slumberous ease. How wild and quiet the place is, you can only realise by living in it from year’s end to year’s end, as has been my own privilege for longer than I care to compute. For how many ages a human settlement has existed in this wooded, sun-flooded cleft of the Downs, it is impossible to hazard a guess. Windlecombe is mentioned in _Domesday_, but the stones of the old church proclaim it as belonging to times more distant still. Be that as it may, its clustered roofs and grey church tower have long been reckoned in the traditions of wild life as part and parcel of the eternal hills. Birds frequent Windlecombe as they haunt the beech-woods that hang upon the sides of the combe. They use the rick-yards and gardens, the very streets even, as they use the glades in the woodlands or the verges of the brooks. You may come out of a winter’s morning and see a heron flapping slowly out of your paddock, or listen to a pheasant’s trumpeting on the other side of the hedge. And in early summer you can sit on the garden bench, and, looking up into the dim elm labyrinth overhead, watch a green woodpecker at work, cutting the hole for his nest straight and true into the heart of the wood. That the thrushes sing all day long from Michaelmas to Midsummer Day, that in June you cannot sleep for the nightingales, that there is never an hour of daylight all the year round when a lark is not carolling against the blue or stormy grey above the village—these things you take as part of your rightful daily fare, and are content.