"It has often seemed to me a pity, from many points of view--and from the point of view of language among the rest--that Winchester did not remain, as it once was, the royal, political, and social capital of England, leaving London to be the commercial capital. The relation between them might have been something like that between Paris and Marseilles or Havre; and perhaps, in that case, neither of them would have been so monstrously overgrown as London is to-day. We should then have had a metropolis free from the fogs of the Thames Valley; situated, not on clammy clay, but on chalk hills, the best soil in the world for habitation; and we might have preserved in our literary language a larger proportion of the racy Saxon of the West Country. Don't you think there is something in this?" Returning from Bincombe and passing through Sutton to Preston we come in a mile to Osmington. A short distance beyond the village a narrow road leads off seawards to Osmington Mills. Crossing the hills, this narrower road descends to the coast and the Picnic Inn--a small hostelry noted for "lobster lunches" and "prawn teas." If we strike inland from Osmington we come to Poxwell, the old manor-house of the Hennings, a curiously walled-in building with a very interesting gate-house. This is the Oxwell Manor of _The Trumpet Major_ and the house of Benjamin Derriman--"a wizened old gentleman, in a coat the colour of his farmyard, breeches of the same hue, unbuttoned at the knees, revealing a bit of leg above his stocking and a dazzlingly white shirt-frill to compensate for this untidiness below. The edge of his skull round his eye-sockets was visible through the skin, and he walked with great apparent difficulty." Pressing onward from this village, we arrive, after a two-mile walk, at "Warm'ell Cross," three miles south-west of Moreton station. The left road leads to Dorchester, the right one to Wareham, and the centre one across the immemorially ancient and changeless "Egdon Heath." Here we turn to the right and Owermoigne, the "Nether Mynton" in which the events of _The Distracted Preacher_ take place. Here indeed is a nook which seems to be a survival from another century; a patch of England of a hundred years ago set down in the England of to-day. The church where Lizzie Newberry and her smugglers stored "the stuff" is hidden from those who pass on the highroad and is reached by a little rutty, crooked lane. The body of the church has been rebuilt, but the tower where the smugglers looked down upon the coastguard officers searching for their casks of brandy remains the same. The highway leads for two miles along the verge of Egdon Heath, and then we come to a right-hand turning taking us past Winfrith Newburgh and over the crest of the chalk downs steeply down to West Lulworth.