Leaving now the gnarled hawthorn and the cushion of thyme, I pass a deserted sheep-pen, where in the early year the tender lambs were sheltered from the snow and wind. Mile after mile, and still no sign of human life--everywhere silence, solitude. Hill after hill and plain after plain. Presently the turf is succeeded by a hard road--flints ground down into dust by broad waggon-wheels bearing huge towering loads of wool or heavy wheat. Just here the old track happens to answer the purposes of modern civilisation. Fast this, and again it reverts to turf, leaving now the hills for a mile or two to cross a plain lying between a semicircle of downs; and here at last are hedges of hawthorn and hazel and stunted crab tree. Round black marks upon the turf, with grey ashes scattered about and half-consumed sticks, show where the gipsies have recently bivouacked, sheltered somewhat at night by the hedges. Near by is an ancient tumulus, on which grows a small yet obviously aged sycamore tree, stunted by wind and storm, and under it the holes of rabbits--drilling their habitations into the tomb of the unknown warrior. In his day, perhaps, the green track wound through a pathless wood long since cleared. Soon the hedges all but disappear, the ground rises once more, nearing the hills; and here the way widens out--first fifty, then a hundred yards across--green sward dotted with furze and some brake fern, and bunches of tough dry grass. Above on the summit is another ancient camp, and below two more turf-grown tumuli, low and shaped like an inverted bowl. Many more have been ploughed down, doubtless, in the course of the years: sometimes still, as the share travels through the soil there is a sudden jerk, and a scraping sound of iron against stone. The ploughman eagerly tears away the earth, and moves the stone to find a thin jar, as he thinks--in fact, a funeral urn. Like all uneducated people, in the far East as well as in the West, he is imbued with the idea of finding hidden treasure, and breaks the urn in pieces to discover--nothing; it is empty. He will carry the fragments home to the farm, when, after a moment's curiosity, they will be thrown aside with potsherds, and finally used to mend the floor of the cowpen. The track winds away yet further, over hill after hill; but a summer's day is not long enough to trace it to the end.