and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not
one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis,
which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the
bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends,
the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And
so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and
stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or
Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you're young cosmopolites,
belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it's all right; I
dare say it is. This is the day of large views, and glorious humanity,
and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of
White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away
Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the
first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the
Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich
pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber,
with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor