We come to a huge, flat-bottomed, grassy coombe, smooth as a racecourse, that winds out of the cornland into the heart of the Downs. It is like the bed of a river of great depth. At its entrance beeches clothe either side; but presently they cease, and up the steep juniper slopes go the paths of hares, of the herds and flocks of earliest ages and of the men and women and children also, whose children’s children’s children have forgotten them though not perhaps their philosophy. The grass of the slope is mingled with small sweet herbage, the salad burnet rosy-stemmed, the orange bird’s-foot trefoil, the purple thyme, the fine white flax, the delicatest golden hawk-bit, and basil and marjoram, and rosettes of crimson thistles, all sunny warm and fragrant, glittering and glowing or melting into a simmering haze, musical with grasshoppers and a-flutter with blue butterflies, so that the earth seems to be a thick-furred, genial animal. At length the windings shut out the plain, and the coombe is a green hall roofed by the hot blue sky. Its walls are steeper than ever, and the burrowings of the rabbits have streaked the grasses with long splashes--like those made by sea-birds on rocks--of white chalk. The curves of these walls are like those of the flight of the swifts that dive overhead. Here there are no human paths, no sign of house, of grave, of herd, of cultivation. It is the world’s end, and the rabbits race up and down as in a dream of solitude. Yet the mind is not discontented and unfed. This is no boundless solitude of ocean where one may take a kind of pleasure To float for ever with a careless course And think himself the only being alive.