A man looking down from the crest of the Downs to the south and to the north of him sees much of what his ancestry have seen since men first stood upon those hills. The Weald was once a little denser in wood, the coastal plain a little less thick with villages, but that is all. The high, broad belt of the sea has always made a frame for that view. The flooded river valleys have always picked it out with patches of silver. The roll of the Downs has always stood, like a monstrous green wave, blown forward before the south-west wind. The simple and vivid green of the turf, and the sharp white chalk pits, have always stood making the same contrast with the sky and the large sailing clouds; and they will continue to do so for ever. A Sussex man recognises his home when he sees it from the height above Eden Bridge, or from Crowborough top as he enters the county from the north or from the Surrey hills; he knows it when, as he gazes southwards, he catches along the horizon the dark wall of the Downs. The outline is not to be confounded with any other in the world, and these few simple planes of vision build up for him the major pleasures which the landscape of his county can afford. They have not changed in the past and they will not change in the future. With the homelands, with the little valleys and the sandy rocks of the Weald, and the hills between the foot-hills of the southern side of the Downs, the case is different. What the original aspect of these hollows with their clayey or sandy knolls on either side may have been in the beginnings of the county it is now very difficult to conjecture. They are certainly among the very first of its inhabited places, and it is perhaps most accurate to think of them as little packed groups of huts along the [Illustration: CROWBOROUGH HEATH] [Sidenote: THE PINES] stream which almost invariably flows beneath the small steep hillside, these huts surrounded by the pasture of the small pastoral community, and on the upland above by long stretches of open furze and fern. It is probable that the wooding of the knolls came later, and it is remarkable that there is very little ancient plough land in the neighbourhood of most of these villages. Within the last few hundred years their general aspect has completely changed through the introduction of the pine. Along the whole belt of sand from Elsted right away to the valley of the Ouse you get bunches of this tree, making a peculiar note in the landscape; and the same is true of the forest ridge to the north.