in honour of the county in which the common was situated; for though,
probably, if we knew the origin of the name bestowed on each county in
England, we should find them all significant, yet none, I believe, would
be found more picturesque or appropriate than that given by our good
Saxon ancestors to the county in question--being Buchen-heim, or
Buckingham: the home or land of the beeches.

The gorse, fern, and heath, besides a small quantity of not very rich
grass, and a few wild flowers, were the only produce of the ground,
except the trees that I have mentioned; and the only tenants of the
place were a few sheep, by far too lean to need any one to look after
them. On the edges of the common, indeed, might be found an occasional
goose or two, but they were like the white settlers on the coast of
Africa: venturing rarely and timidly into the interior. A high road went
across this track, as I have shown; but it being necessary, from time to
time, that farmers' carts, and other conveyances, horses, waggons,
tinkers' asses, and flocks of sheep, should cross it in different
directions, and as each of these travelling bodies, in common with the
world in general, liked to have a way of its own, the furze and fern had
been cut down in many long straight lines; and paths for horse and foot,
as well as long tracks of wheels, and deep ruts, crossed and recrossed
each other all over the common. To have seen it--nay, to see it now, for
it exists very nearly in its primeval state--one would suppose, from all
the various tracks, that it was a place of great thoroughfare, when, to
say truth, though I have crossed it some twenty times or more, I never
saw any travelling thing upon it but a solitary tax-cart and a gipsy's
van.

It was just about the middle of this common, then, that Wilton Brown, as
I have said, perceived another horseman riding along at the same slow