A true exemplar this of that Sussex of which in 1690 a barrister on circuit, whose profession led him by evil chance into this county, writes to his wife: "The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I vow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of dirt for a poor livelihood. The county is in a sink of about fourteen miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from the long ranges of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time." Such soft and shaky earth as this could not bear the weight of so ponderous a structure as was Slaugham Place: the swamps pulled its masonry apart and rotted its fittings. Despairing of victory over the reeking moisture, its owners left it for healthier sites. Then the rapacity of all those neighbouring folk who had need of building material completed the havoc wrought by natural forces, and finally Slaugham Place became what it is to-day. Its clock-tower was pulled down and removed to Cuckfield Park, where it now spans the entrance drive of that romantic spot, and its handsomely carved Jacobean stairway is to-day the pride and glory of the "Star" Hotel at Lewes. The Coverts are gone; their heraldic shields, in company of an architectural frieze of greyhounds' and leopards' heads and skulls of oxen wreathed in drapery, still decorate what remains of the north front of their mansion, and their achievements are repeated upon their tombs within the little church of Slaugham on the hillside. You may, if heraldically versed, learn from their quarterings into what families they married; but the deeds they wrought, and their virtues and their vices, are, for the most part, clean forgotten, even as their name is gone out of the land, who once, as tradition has it, travelled southward from London to the sea on their own manors. [Illustration: BOLNEY.] The squat, shingled spirelet of Slaugham Church and its decorated architecture mark the spot where many of this knightly race lie buried. In the Covert Chapel is the handsome brass of John Covert, who died in 1503; and in the north wall of the chancel is the canopied altar-tomb of Richard Covert, the much-married, who died in 1547, and is represented, in company of three of his four wives, by little brass effigies, together with a curious brass representing the Saviour rising from the tomb, guarded by armed knights of weirdly-humorous aspect, the more diverting because executed all innocent of joke or irreverence. Here is a rubbing, nothing exaggerated, of one of these guardian knights, to bear me up. [Illustration: FROM A BRASS AT SLAUGHAM.]