a connecting hand to long-vanished generations, to the men and women who raised the huge earthen walls of the camps on these hills. She has a trembling small face, wrinkled and yellow like old newspaper, above a windy bunch of rags, chiefly black rags. A Welshwoman who has been in England fifty years, she remembers or thinks of chiefly those Welsh years when, as a girl, she rode a pony into Neath market. She hums a Welsh tune and still laughs at it because she heard it first in those days from one then poor and old and abject--she herself tall and wilful--and the words of it were: “O, my dear boy, don’t get married.” She would like once again to lie in her warm bed and hear the steady rain falling in the black night upon the mountain. She feels the sharp flint against the sole of her foot and appears not to be annoyed or indignant or resolved to be rid of the pain, but only puzzled by the flintiness of God as she travels, in the long pageant of those who go on living, the lonely downland road among the gorse and the foxgloves, in the hot but still misty morning when the grey and the chestnut horses, patient and huge and shining among the sheaves, wait for the reaping machine to be uncovered and the day’s work to begin. Through the grey land goes a narrow and flat vale of grass and of thatched cottages. The river winds among willows and makes a green world, out of which the Downs rise suddenly with their wheat. Here stands a farm with dormers in its high yellow roof and a square of beeches round about. There a village, even its walls thatched, flutters white linen and blue smoke against a huge chalk scoop in the Downs behind. For miles only the cherry-coloured clusters of the guelder-rose break through the rain and the gently changing grey of the cornland and green of the valley, until several farms of thatched brick gather together under elms and mellowing chestnuts and make a crooked hamlet. Or at a bend in the road a barn like a diminutive down stands among ricks and under elms; behind is a red farm and church tower embowered; in front, the threshing machine booms and smokes and an old drenched woman stands bent aloft receiving the sheaves in her blue stiff claws. Close by, a man leads a horse away from a field and its companion looks over the gate with longing, and turns away and again returning almost jumps it, but failing through fearfulness at seeing the other so near the bend in the road, races down the hedge and back and stands listening to the other’s whinny, and then scattering the turf dashes into an orchard beyond and whinnies as he gallops. In majesty, rigid and black, the steam ploughs are working up against the treeless sky; and, just seen in the rain, the white horse carved upon the hill seems a living thing, but of mist.