soil; you could read of them as found elsewhere in January; they rarely
came much before March, and but sparingly then. On the warm red sand
(red, at least, to look at, but green by geological courtesy, I think) of
Sussex, round about Hurst of the Pierre-points, primroses are seen soon
after the year has turned. In the lanes about that curious old mansion,
with its windows reaching from floor to roof, that stands at the base of
Wolstanbury Hill, they grow early, and ferns linger in sheltered overhung
banks. The South Down range, like a great wall, shuts off the sea, and
has a different climate on either hand; south by the sea--hard, harsh,
flowerless, almost grassless, bitter, and cold; on the north side, just
over the hill--warm, soft, with primroses and fern, willows budding and
birds already busy. It is a double England there, two countries side by
side.

On a summer's day Wolstanbury Hill is an island in sunshine; you may lie
on the grassy rampart, high up in the most delicate air--Grecian air,
pellucid--alone, among the butterflies and humming bees at the thyme,
alone and isolated; endless masses of hills on three sides, endless weald
or valley on the fourth; all warmly lit with sunshine, deep under liquid
sunshine like the sands under the liquid sea, no harshness of man-made
sound to break the insulation amid nature, on an island in a far Pacific
of sunshine. Some people would hesitate to walk down the staircase cut in
the turf to the beech-trees beneath; the woods look so small beneath, so
far down and steep, and no handrail. Many go to the Dyke, but none to
Wolstanbury Hill. To come over the range reminds one of what travellers
say of coming over the Alps into Italy; from harsh sea-slopes, made dry
with salt as they sow salt on razed cities that naught may grow, to warm
plains rich in all things, and with great hills as pictures hung on a
wall to gaze at. Where there are beech-trees the land is always
beautiful; beech-trees at the foot of this hill, beech-trees at Arundel