the all-night glimmer of the city, warning, threatening, beckoning anon. Some of this country has already perished, or is so ramparted about that there is no stranger country in the world unless it be those perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Mountains, their floors level and of the purest grass, but accessible only at the end nearest the plain, where the cleft is sometimes so narrow that not even a dog can enter. This, then, is my South Country. It covers the North Downs and the South Downs, the Icknield Way and the Pilgrims’ Way, and the cross-roads between them and the Thames and the sea, a land of hops, fruit, corn, high pasture, meadow, woodland, heath and shore. But there is no man of whose powers I stand more in awe than the topographical writer, from Mr. A. G. Bradley or Mr. E. V. Lucas downwards. I shall not attempt to compete with them. I should only be showing my ignorance and carelessness were I to label every piece of country which I chance to mention or describe. Any one can point out my omissions, my blindness, my exaggeration. Nor can I bring myself to mention the names of the places where I walked or sat down. In a sense this country is all “carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. This is not the South Country which measures about two hundred miles from east to west and fifty from north to south. In some ways it is incomparably larger than any country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other ways it is far smaller--as when a mountain with tracts of sky and cloud and the full moon glass themselves in a pond, a little pond. It would need a more intellectual eye than mine to distinguish county from county by its physical character, its architecture, its people, its unique combination of common elements, and I shall not attempt it. As often as not I have no doubt mingled parts of Kent with my Wiltshire, and so on. And positively I cannot say to which belongs one picture that occurs to me as characteristic of the South Country--