An uncertain path keeps to the highest ridge. The sides of the Downs are invaded by long stream-like gorse-sided coombes, of which the narrow floor is palest green grass. The highest points command much of earth, all of heaven. They are treeless, but occasionally the turf is over-arched by the hoops of a brier thicket, the new foliage pierced by upright dead grey grass. They are the haunt of the swift, the home of wheatear and lark and of whatsoever in the mind survives or is born in this pure kingdom of grass and sky. Ahead, they dip to a river and rise again, their sweep notched by a white road. At the inland end of this river valley is an antique red-tiled large village or small town, a perfect group of human dwellings, as inevitable as the Downs, dominated by a mound and on it a windmill in ruin; mothered by a church at the river’s edge. Under the sign of “Ye Olde ----” is a room newly wainscoted in shining matchboard. Its altar--its little red sideboard--is symmetrically decorated by tiers and rows of lemonade, cherry cider and ginger ale bottles, many-coloured, and in the midst of these two syphons of soda-water. The doorways and windows are draped in white muslin, the hearth filled by a crinkled blue paper fan; the mantelpiece supports a dozen small vases. The oilcloth is new and odorous and bright. There are pink geraniums in salmon-coloured bowls on the table; a canary in a suspended cage; and on the walls a picture of a girl teasing a dog with a toy mouse. At the cross-roads is a group of old slated white farm buildings and a tiled farmhouse of brick and flint; and above, at the top of a slope of down, is a grey spire and two orange roofs of cottages amidst a round cluster of trees; the sheep graze and their bells tittle-tattle. The seaward-going road alongside but above the river dips then under steep banks of blackthorn and parsley to a village of flint where another spire rises out of the old roofs of a farmhouse and its family of barns and lodges; a nightingale sings at hand, a wheeling pewit cries and gleams over the blue ripples of the river. Across the water a shallow scoop has been carved by Nature out of the side of the down; it is traversed by two diverging paths which alone are green, for the rest of the surface is of gorse and, full in the face of the sun, forms a mossy cirrus over the mist of its own warm shade. The down beside the road is now all cowslips among its scattered bramble and thorn, until it is cloven by a tributary bay, a quarter of a mile in length, marshy at first and half-filled by elms and willows, but at its higher end occupied, behind ash trees and an orchard, by a farmhouse, a circular domed building and a barn, all having roofs of ochre tile, except the thatched barn, and grey stained walls; a straight road goes to the house along the edge of the marsh and elms. Grey plover whistle singly on the wet borders of the stream or make a concerted whimper of two or three.