Came from Alresford to Hambledon, through Titchbourn, Cheriton, Beauworth, Kilmston, and Exton. This is all a high, hard, dry, fox-hunting country. Like that, indeed, over which I came yesterday. At Titchbourn, there is a park, and "great house," as the country-people call it. The place belongs, I believe, to a Sir somebody _Titchbourne_, a family, very likely half as old as the name of the village, which, however, partly takes its name from the _bourn_ that runs down the valley. I thought, as I was riding alongside of this park, that I had heard _good_ of this family of Titchbourne, and, I therefore saw the park _pales_ with sorrow. There is not more than one pale in a yard, and those that remain, and the rails and posts and all, seem tumbling down. This park-paling is perfectly typical of those of the landlords who are _not tax-eaters_. They are wasting away very fast. The tax-eating landlords think to swim out the gale. They are deceived. They are "deluded" by their own greediness. Kilmston was my next place after Titchbourn, but I wanted to go to Beauworth, so that I had to go through Cheriton; a little, hard, iron village, where all seems to be as old as the hills that surround it. In coming along you see Titchbourn church away to the right, on the side of the hill, a very pretty little view; and this, though such a hard country, is a pretty country. At Cheriton I found a grand camp of _Gipsys_, just upon the move towards Alresford. I had met some of the scouts first, and afterwards the advanced guard, and here the main body was getting in motion. One of the scouts that I met was a young woman, who, I am sure, was six feet high. There were two or three more in the camp of about the same height; and some most strapping fellows of men. It is curious that this race should have preserved their dark skin and coal-black straight and coarse hair, very much like that of the American Indians. I mean the hair, for the skin has nothing of the copper-colour as that of the Indians has. It is not, either, of the Mulatto cast; that is to say, there is no yellow in it. It is a black mixed with our English colours of pale, or red, and the features are small, like those of the girls in Sussex, and often singularly pretty. The tall girl that I met at Titchbourn, who had a huckster basket on her arm, had most beautiful features. I pulled up my horse, and said, "Can you tell me my fortune, my dear?" She answered in the negative, giving me a look at the same time, that seemed to say, it was _too late_; and that if I had been thirty years younger she might have seen a little what she could do with me. It is, all circumstances considered, truly surprising, that this race should have preserved so perfectly all its distinctive marks.