I hoped to find a cart track going west from the other side of this road. For about a quarter of a mile I thought I found it raised a little in the stubble. It had been sown and reaped like the rest of the field, but it was a little weedier and grassier. It was making over the swelling arable for Lark Hill and the south edge of Wantage, but I could not find it in the clover nor in the barley beyond that. I therefore turned north into Round Hill, a straight piece of hard road going west into Wantage, with no hedges but grassy borders between it and the arable on either side. This may be the Icknield Way or its successor. It led into the main road at the edge of Wantage, and this I followed into the town. In the first few yards I noticed the sign of the “Lord Nelson” on the left. I recognized it as the work of that venerable artist who designs the faces of guys and turnip-men all over the country. I could tell that the man upon the signboard was Nelson because the uniform corresponded to the name painted below. The face was as much like Nelson as King George III, and it was entirely different from that on the other side of the board. Nevertheless, the effort was to be preferred to a more accurate portrait painted by a builder and decorator’s man from a picture in a history book. It was an effort to represent an image of a hero. The builder and decorator’s man would have aimed simply at reproducing something which impressed him because it was in a printed book: his horses do not represent what he knows or feels about horses, but what he is able to crib from a photographer in a book advertising somebody’s food or embrocation; his “Coach and Horses” is painful to see, because it ought obviously to be in a book. May it be long before he is allowed to molest the shape of the horse or dragon carved into the turf of White Horse Hill. In its present shape it could not be used to advertise horse food or embrocation: but the horse above Alton Priors could be so used and doubtless one day will be. As I was leaving Wantage I heard a blackbird singing in a garden beyond the church. This was near the middle of August and a full month since I had last heard one. The heat had dried up the birds’ songs all much earlier than usual, and now the rain of the last night seemed to be reviving one. The song was perfect and as strange a thing as last year’s snow.