for the isolation of their farmhouses, and to-day for the way in which the Londoner is discovering to his cost the stubborn nature of the county. Modern invention, and especially the invention of the motor car, has made this situation tempting enough to townsmen, but the new buildings which they attempt to found upon places whose desertion is incomprehensible to them are met with continual difficulties. The water is often bad, the soil much damper in winter than the summer promised--for these experiments are nearly always the result of a first view taken in the height of summer. The long, and often futile, digging for good water, the cost of pumping it when, if ever, it is found, combine to make the new attempts at building on the clay of the Weald grow slacker as time proceeds. There are, however, more grateful opportunities scattered here and there in those outcrops of sand and gravel of which I have spoken. Haywards Heath has grown up in this way, and there are a multitude of villages half-way between the forest ridge and the Downs which owe the greater part of their beauty to the sharp contours of the sandstone. These outcrops have formed centres of population from the very earliest times, as, for example, at Burton, Egdean, Thakeham, Ashington, and in many other places. This belt of clay interspersed with occasional heights of sand, and lying between the forest ridge and the Downs, is the broadest of the four; it is rarely less than ten miles in width and often as much as fifteen. Just between it and the escarpment of the Downs runs a narrow belt of green-sand, and again, right under the hills, a narrow belt of loam, which last affords almost the best arable land in this part of the county. It is this narrow belt of loam which has given their value to a procession of famous estates under the shadow of the hills, as Heyshott, where was Cobden’s Farm; Graffham; Lavington, which was Sargent land, and of which Wilberforce and Manning were in turn the squires; Burton, which was the first to appear in history; West Burton; Bignor, which the Romans developed; Bury, upon the Arun. To some extent Parrham, the most typical of Sussex houses, and Wistons, the best example of the renaissance, draw their wealth from this narrow belt of loam, as, farther east, does New Timber, and many another great house. The list might be extended indefinitely. This long stretch under the escarpment of the [Illustration: BURY, FROM THE ARUN] [Sidenote: THE BRITISH TRACK]