[Sidenote: _HAMPSHIRE ARCHITECTURE_] Hampshire cottage architecture is peculiarly characteristic of the county. The wayside villages and the scattered hamlets that nestle between the folds of its chalky hills are made up of cottages built with chalk rubble, or with black flints and red brick mixed. The flints being readily obtained, they form by far the greater portion of Hampshire walls; the red brick being used for dressings and for binding the long, flinty expanses together, or occupying the place taken by stone quoins, in counties where building-stone is freely found. Thus, the homely architecture of the greater part of Hants is mean and uninteresting, for black flint is not beautiful and has never been used with good effect in modern times, although in ancient days the mediæval builders and architects of East Anglia--notably in Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds--contrived some remarkably effective work in this unpromising material. Some old work in the larger Hampshire towns, notably at Hyde Abbey, Winchester, shows an effective use of black flint in squares alternating with squared stone,--a method known as diaper work,--but the elaborate flint panelling of Norfolk and Suffolk is unknown in Hampshire. And this brings me to Liphook, a roadside village perhaps originally sprung from the near neighbourhood of the old deer-forest of Woolmer, when half-forgotten Saxon and Norman kings and queens, earls and thanes, hunted here and made the echoes resound with the winding of their horns--"made the welkin ring," in fact, as the fine romantic writers of some generations ago said, in that free and fearless way which is, alas! so discredited now-a-days. And this is so much more a pity, because along this old road, upon whose every side the hallooing and the rumour of the hunting-field were wont to be heard so often and so loudly, one could have worked in that phrase about "the welkin" with such fine effect, had it not been altogether so battered and worn-out a literary _cliché_. This it is to be born a hundred years later than Sir Walter Scott! [Sidenote: _FOREST FIRES_]