he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never
lose him as you do in hilly districts.

And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which
wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a
magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds,
all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left
it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see
eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or
fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to
overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls away rapidly on
all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to
your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There
is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and here it lies,
just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by
her Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and
the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys
for the ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you
won't forget, a place to open a man's soul, and make him prophesy, as
he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord
before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the
right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along
which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the
Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest
back of the hills--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him