This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily, the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own. All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that is to say, the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’--whoever they may have been. If technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it. Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the ‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles, either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the downs, like Winterslow Hut. Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the Anglo-Saxon _scora_, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook, with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards. [Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.] [Sidenote: _OLD BASING_] It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church, which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman bishop, Saint Swithun. Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the ‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the town of Basingstoke.