Of these amateur soldierings he speaks as a ‘wandering life of military service,’ a very amusing view of what everybody else but that pompous historian regarded as mere picnics. But Gibbon, although his person was not precisely that of an ideal military commander, and although the awkward squads he accompanied were not easily comparable with the legions of old Rome, affected to believe that the military knowledge he thus acquired among the hills and woodlands of Hants and Dorset was of the greatest use in helping him to understand the strategic feats of Cæsar and Hannibal in Britain or across the Alps. Let us smile! In after years, when living at Lausanne, amid the eternal hills and mountains of Switzerland, he looked back upon those days with regret, alike for the good company of his brother officers, the jovial nights at the ‘Crown’ in ‘pleasant, hospitable Blandford,’ and for the interference those happy times caused to his studies; when, instead of burning the midnight oil, he drank deeply of the two-o’clock-in-the-morning punch-bowl. Many of Blandford’s natives have risen to more than local eminence. Latest among her distinguished sons is Alfred Stevens, that fine artist who designed the Wellington Monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as yet, unhappily, incomplete. He came into contact with governments and red-tape, and broken in spirit and in health by disappointments, died in 1875. A tablet on the wall of his birthplace in Salisbury Street records the fact that he was born in 1817. [Illustration: TOWN BRIDGE, BLANDFORD.] XXXVII [Sidenote: _WINTERBORNE WHITCHURCH_] Sixteen and a quarter miles of very varied road brought the old coachmen with steaming horses clattering from Blandford into Dorchester, past the villages of Winterborne Whitchurch, Milborne St. Andrew, and the village of Piddletown, which is by no means a town, and never was. It is a long, long rise out of Blandford, past tree-shaded Bryanstone and over the Town Bridge, to the crest of Charlton Downs, a mile out; where, looking back, the town is seen lying in a wooded hollow almost surrounded by park-like trees in dense clumps--the woods of Bryanstone. From this point of vantage it is clearly seen how Blandford is entered downhill from east or west.