Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and
miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire.
Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the
stanch little pack who dash after him--heads high and sterns low, with
a breast-high scent--can consume the ground at such times. There being
little ploughland, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting
country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer,
old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least
regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy
lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built
chiefly of good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the
last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is
beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots
of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting
often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people;
and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly
made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still pleasant jog-trot roads
running through the great pasture-lands, dotted here and there with
little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence
on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes
you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of
looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country; but a vale--that
is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view
if you choose to turn towards him--that's the essence of a vale. There