the upper Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in the Weald is exemplified in such a journey--and it is a journey which, though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have formed highways for armies--for instance, all that rotten land in the great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the _Solitarium_, and which the French called the _Sologne_. But the Weald differs from most others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence that the Romans, when they built their great military road--perhaps their only purely military road in Britain--across the Weald skipped one intervening station which should, upon the analogy of others, have been present upon it in the heart of the Weald, and pressed the march in this place to nearly double its usual length. The French armies do precisely the same thing in the bad lands of the Plain of Chalons to-day. Wherever there is ancient habitation in the Weald, or rather upon the fringes of the Weald, there is good, plentiful, and perennial water; elsewhere the Weald is still what it has been throughout history--a great rolling place, not deserted, not lonely, and yet not humanised. It is exactly the place for a seclusion from men, for you can see some men, but not too many of them; and I have always thought that King wise, who, when his enemies desired to kill him, wandered in the Andredsweald. The historians say that he took refuge in the impassable thickets of the forest. This is bosh. No man can sleep out in this climate for a season round, nor can any man live without cooked meat, nor do I see an Anglo-Saxon king living without wine and a good deal of pomp into the bargain. As to the wine, men might argue, but as to the pomp, they cannot. I will tell you what this King did without any doubt. He went from steading to steading and was royally entertained, and if you ask why it was a refuge for him the answer is that it was a refuge against the pursuit of many men. The Weald is a refuge against the pursuit of many men. It was so then: it is so now.