Now it is a woodland country, of broad wooded common and low undulating Downs crowned or fringed by woods: this is “Swineherd’s County” according to the gypsies. Houses are few and stand either well off the road or with scarcely a dividing line between their gardens and the commons from which they have been filched. Their linen and red flannel flap under enormous beeches where an old track makes its way betwixt them. The children living here, the generations of them who have been bred in the little flint house, are children of the woods, their minds half made by the majestic but dark and deep-voiced trees that stand over them day and night and by the echoes--you may hear them summoning the echoes at evening out of the glades and see them pause as if dazed by the wild reply. Opposite the door is a close untrodden tangle of brier and thorn and bramble under oaks where the dead leaves of many autumns lie untouched even by the wind--so dense is the underwood--that sighs continually in the topmost boughs: at the edge nettles with translucent leaves waver and nod above mossy banks. Not far off is a Woodland Farm, a group of houses and barns and sheds built of flint and wood and thatched, aloof. A man enters one of the cavernous sheds with a pail; a thick, bent, knotty man, with bushy dark hair and beard and bright black eyes, a farmer, the son’s son of one who rebuilt the house when the woods were darker and huger still. Life is a dark simple matter for him; three-quarters of his living is done for him by the dead; merely to look at him is to see a man live generations thick, so to speak, and neither Nature nor the trumpery modern man can easily disturb a human character of that density. As I watch him going to and fro I lose sight of everything away from his rude house and the tall woods, because they and he are so powerful--he has the trees as well as his ancestors at his back--and it is no flight of fancy to see him actually cut off from all the world except the house and woods, and yet holding his own, able to keep his fire burning, his larder full, his back covered and his house dry. I feel but a wraith as I pass by. I wonder what there is worth knowing that he does not know, with his bright eyes, bright long teeth, stiff limbs capable of unceasing toil, and that look of harmony with day and night. I see him looking on as the wounded trooper--two hundred and fifty years, a trifle, ago--drains the water just lifted from the well; look at his gallant face, his delicate ardour as of another race, bright dress, restless blue eyes, his helplessness after the defeat in a cavalry fight about nothing at all. The cornet rides away and the woodland fellow puts all his nature into the felling of a beech as into an object worthy of cold steel, and as he plies his axe he smiles at the thought of that brave, that silly face and sleek hair. He smiles to-day as he sees a youth go by with proud looks of command, incapable, as he well understands, of