[Sidenote: OLD SUSSEX WAYS] Sussex ways are, many of them, still curiously patriarchal. But a few years ago, and ploughing was commonly performed in these fields by oxen. [Illustration: CLAYTON CHURCH AND THE SOUTH DOWNS.] Their cottages that, until a few years ago, were the same as ever, have recently been very largely rebuilt, much to the sorrow of those who love the picturesque. They were thatched, for the most part, or tiled, or roofed with stone slabs. A living-room with yawning fireplace and capacious settle was the chief feature of them. The floor was covered with red bricks. When the settle was drawn up to the cheerful blaze the interior was cosy. But many of the most picturesque cottages were damp and insanitary, and although they pleased the artist to look at, it by no means followed that they would have contented him to live in. Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be purchased, but not for silver: If you wish your bees to thrive, Gold must be paid for ev'ry hive; For when they're bought with other money, There will be neither swarm nor honey. The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible on the surface. In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the proper time for "worsling," that is "wassailing" the orchards, but more particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks: Stand fast root, bear well top; Pray, good God, send us a howling crop Ev'ry twig, apples big; Ev'ry bough, apples enow'; Hats full, caps full, Full quarters, sacks full. These wassailing folk were generally known as "howlers"; "doubtless rightly," says a Sussex archæologist, "for real old Sussex music is in a minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling." This knowledge enlightens our reading of the pages of the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted Keynes, when he records: "1670, 26th Dec., I gave the howling boys 6d.;" a statement which, if not illumined by acquaintance with these old customs, would be altogether incomprehensible. Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not "January butter." and the harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree? Saints' days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day: