CHAPTER V SUSSEX A few miles south of that great presiding pollard beech is the boundary line between Surrey and Kent on the north and Sussex on the south. A few miles over the line the moorland organ roll of heather and birch and pine succeeds the grassy undulations and the well-grown beech and oak. The yellow roving lines of the paths cut through the heather into the sand add to the wildness of the waste, by their suggestion of mountain torrents and of channels worn in the soft rock or clay by the sea. The same likeness in little is often to be seen upon a high-pitched roof of thatch when the straw is earth-coloured and tunnelled by birds and seamed by rain. Here the houses are of stone, unadorned, heather-thatched. The maker of birch-heath brooms plies his trade. There are stacks of heath and gorse in the yard. All the more fair are the grooves in the moorland, below the region of pines, where the tiled white-boarded mill stands by the sheen of a ford, and the gorse is bright and white clothes are blowing over neat gardens and the first rose. On a day of rain and gloom the answer of the gorse to sudden lights and heats is delicious; all those dull grey and glaucous and brown dry spines bursting into cool and fragrant fire is as great a miracle as the turning of flames to roses round a martyr’s feet. It is only too easy for the pheasant lords to plant larch in parallelograms: to escape from them it is necessary to go in amongst them. Yet there are parts of the forest large and dark and primeval in look, with a few poor isolated houses and a thin file of telegraph posts crossing it among the high gloomy pines and down to the marshy hollows, to the strewn gold of dwarf willows, and up again to the deserted wooden windmill, the empty boarded cottage, the heather-thatched sheds at the southern edge of the moor. Looking at this tract of wild land the mind seems to shed many centuries of civilization and to taste something of the early man’s alarm in the presence of the uncultured hills--an alarm which is in us tempered so as to aid an impression of the sublime. Its influence lingers in the small strips of roadside gorse beyond its proper boundary. Then, southward, there are softly dipping meadows, fields of young corn, and oaks thrown among the cowslips. The small farmhouses are neat and good--one has a long stone wall in front, and, over the road, tall Scotch firs above a green pond dappled by the water crowfoot’s white blossoms and bordered by sallow and rush. Narrow copses of oak or wide hedges of hazel and sallow line the road; and they are making cask hoops under lodges of boughs at the woodsides. Bluebells and primroses and cuckoo flowers are not to be counted under the trees. The long moist meadows flow among the woods up and down from farm to farm and spire to tower. Each farmhouse group is new--this one is roofed and walled with tiles; and opposite is a tangle of grass and gorse, with