Amesbury is now, as always, the objective point for Stonehenge, a mile and a half distant. It is 8 miles from here to Salisbury, and the river continues to plough its deep furrow through the plain. But the atmosphere by this time is a less aloof and more populous one, the river-side road more travelled, for British, American, and foreign pilgrims from Salisbury to Stonehenge will in summer time be frequently in evidence upon it. The villages are still thatch-roofed, and flint-walled after the chess-board pattern common to Wiltshire, and the cult of flowers, that generations of low wages have not extinguished in the Wiltshire peasant, add to their charm. The high downs on either hand no longer suggest such a solitary hinterland. A thicker foliage mantles from time to time in the vale. The river skirts the lawns of some country-seat such as Lake House, one of the best Tudor buildings in Wiltshire, and a little below, again, of Heale, where Charles II. on his flight from Worcester lay concealed by its then owner, Mrs. Hyde, for nearly a week. Often performed twice a season and generally by men wading in with scythes, weed cutting is a regular operation in the life of such streams as this; nowadays, particularly, since trout fishing has become so valuable, these rivers for the most part are kept assiduously clean. Nor is any aspect of a chalk stream perhaps more beautiful than where some swift-gliding current is running a couple of feet over the growing water-weed, all swaying and flickering in green streamers with every motion of the pellucid and wayward current. The Avon, too, is a prolific and notable trout river, where the disciples of the modern cult of the dry-fly leave no half-mile of water going begging for a lessee, and the May-fly here hatches out right up to the river's source.