He was drinking from a tankard of the pea-soup which they call ale in these parts, sitting the while upon a bench whose like is usually found outside old country inns. Ruddy of face, with clean-shaven lips and chin, his grizzled beard kept rigidly upon his wrinkled dewlap, his hands gnarled and twisted with toil and rheumatism, he sat there in smock-frock and gaiters, as typical a countryman as ever on London stage brought the scent of the hay across the footlights. That smock of his, the "round frock" of Sussex parlance, was worked about the yoke of it, fore and aft, with many and curious devices, whose patterns, though he, and she who worked them, knew it not, derived from centuries of tradition and precept, had been handed down from Saxon times, aye, and before them, to the present day, when, their significance lost, they excite merely a mild wonder at their oddity and complication. [Illustration: THE SWITCHBACK ROAD, EARLSWOOD COMMON.] He was, it seemed, a "hedger and ditcher," and his leathern gauntlets and billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench. "I've worked at this sort o' thing," said he, in conversation, "for the last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for't too. Two and twopence a day I gets, an' works from seven o'marnings to half-past five in the afternoon for that. You'll be gettin' more than two and twopence a day when you're at work, I reckon." To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for he had visited London, and "a dirty place it was, sure-ly." Also he had been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called "Madame Two Swords": places that Londoners generally leave to provincials. Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock sights of town than townsfolk themselves. From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the midnight of October 31st, 1881. At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield Castle. [Sidenote: THUNDERFIELD CASTLE] Thunderfield Castle should--if tremendous names go for aught--be a stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the estate of Harrowslea--"Harsley," as the countryfolk call it--supposed to have once belonged to King Harold.