What is it? A small lane, no more, no less--a narrow trackway which one would pass without noticing, if he did not know it was the famous Pilgrims Way, the Old Road, the ancient trackway which ran westwards from Kent to Cornwall, and existed in days when no such names were known in the land. In the history of this lane, the name of the Pilgrims' Way is a modern title; it existed long before pilgrims were known, and it was used in the dim, far-off dawn of civilization when skin-clothed Britons carried their loads of metal eastwards to send them across the narrow seas. How old it is no man can say, but it runs along ridge and height, showing that it was marked out in times when the lower-lying country was impassable owing to marsh and woodland. THROUGH WESSEX--I. "Wessex?" you say. "What county is that? We know Essex and Sussex, but where is Wessex?" Well, it is not a county, and you will not find the name on a map of England; but it is a good English name for all that, and once was the name of an important English kingdom. When Alfred the Great became King, he ruled over Wessex, the south-western part of England, and the old name still clings to the district, which is now cut up into several modern counties. Wessex is a land of downs and dales, and broad stretches of fertile country. It is the home of the chalk hills--those great, smooth, rolling heights, covered with short, sweet grass, on which great flocks of sheep pasture and speck the vast slopes with dots of white. "There is hardly any part of our land which has remained so little unchanged as these Downs of Wessex. It is not because they are rugged and difficult to climb: they are not; they are often easy to surmount. There are far wilder and higher looking hills in both Wales and Scotland, which have inhabitants, which are ploughed in patches and dotted with whitewashed cottages. Yet the Downs remain lonely, their sky-line unbroken by any sign of the presence of man. Just as the Roman saw them from his trireme, the Saxon from his long ship, the Dane from his war-boat, so we see them to-day--great solitary green mounds, 600, 700, 800 feet high." Why is this? The answer is simple. They lack water. Down their sides flow no brooks, babbling from stone to stone; they are waterless, and therefore treeless and houseless. They get plenty of rain, of course, for when the sou'-westers blow up from the Atlantic they are drenched by many a heavy storm. But the water does not run down their sides as a river, or gather in their hollows as a lake. The chalk of which they are composed is too porous for that, and the rain sinks swiftly and is lost.