"He that will not when he may,
When he will, he shall have nay.


Some fifteen years ago the Londoners might have had water from us;
and I was one of those who did my best to get it for them: but
the water companies did not choose to take it; and now this part
of England is growing so populous and so valuable that it wants
all its little rainfall for itself. So there is another leaf torn
out of the Sibylline books for the poor old water companies. You
do not understand: you will some day. But you may comfort
yourself about London. For it happens to be, I think, the
luckiest city in the world; and if it had not been, we should have
had pestilence on pestilence in it, as terrible as the great
plague of Charles II.'s time. The old Britons, without knowing in
the least what they were doing, settled old London city in the
very centre of the most wonderful natural reservoir in this
island, or perhaps in all Europe; which reaches from Kent into
Wiltshire, and round again into Suffolk; and that is, the dear old
chalk downs."

"Why, they are always dry."

"Yes. But the turf on them never burns up, and the streams which
flow through them never run dry, and seldom or never flood either.
Do you not know, from Winchester, that that is true? Then where
is all the rain and snow gone, which falls on them year by year,
but into the chalk itself, and into the green-sands, too, below