I came on to Beauworth to inquire after the family of a worthy old farmer, whom I knew there some years ago, and of whose death I had heard at Alresford. A bridle road over some fields and through a coppice took me to Kilmston, formerly a large village, but now mouldered into two farms, and a few miserable tumble-down houses for the labourers. Here is a house, that was formerly the residence of the landlord of the place, but is now occupied by one of the farmers. This is a fine country for fox-hunting, and Kilmston belonged to a Mr. Ridge who was a famous fox-hunter, and who is accused of having spent his fortune in that way. But what do people mean? He had a right to spend his _income_, as his fathers had done before him. It was the Pitt-system, and not the fox-hunting, that took away the principal. The place now belongs to a Mr. Long, whose origin I cannot find out. From Kilmston I went right over the downs to the top of a hill called _Beacon Hill_, which is one of the loftiest hills in the country. Here you can see the Isle of Wight in detail, a fine sweep of the sea; also away into Sussex, and over the New Forest into Dorsetshire. Just below you, to the East, you look down upon the village of Exton; and you can see up this valley (which is called a _Bourn_ too) as far as West Meon, and down it as far as Soberton. Corhampton, Warnford, Meon-Stoke and Droxford come within these two points; so that here are six villages on this bourn within the space of about five miles. On the other side of the main valley down which the bourn runs, and opposite Beacon Hill, is another such a hill, which they call _Old Winchester Hill_. On the top of this hill there was once a camp, or, rather fortress; and the ramparts are now pretty nearly as visible as ever. The same is to be seen on the Beacon Hill at Highclere. These ramparts had nothing of the principles of modern fortification in their formation. You see no signs of salliant angles. It was a _ditch_ and _a bank_, and that appears to have been all. I had, I think, a full mile to go down from the top of Beacon Hill to Exton. This is the village where that _Parson Baines_ lives who, as described by me in 1817, bawled in Lord Cochrane's ear at Winchester in the month of March of that year. Parson _Poulter_ lives at Meon-Stoke, which is not a mile further down. So that this valley has something in it besides picturesque views! I asked some countrymen how Poulter and Baines did; but their answer contained too much of _irreverence_ for me to give it here. At Exton I crossed the Gosport turnpike road, came up the cross valley under the South side of Old Winchester Hill, over Stoke down, then over West-End down, and then to my friend's house at West-End in the parish of Hambledon. Thus have I crossed nearly the whole of this country from the North-West to the South-East, without going five hundred yards on a turnpike road, and, as nearly as I could do it, in a straight line.