colour--blue and white and rose--of milk-wort and squinancy-wort, and in
the large flowers of the dwarf thistle, glowing purple in its green
setting; and I hear it in every bird-sound, in the trivial songs of
yellow-hammer and corn-bunting, and of dunnock and wren and whitethroat.

The pleasure of walking on the downs is not, however, a subject which
concerns me now; it is one I have written about in a former work,
"Nature in Downland," descriptive of the South Downs. The theme of the
present work is the life, human and other, of the South Wiltshire Downs,
or of Salisbury Plain. It is the part of Wiltshire which has most
attracted me. Most persons would say that the Marlborough Downs are
greater, more like the great Sussex range as it appears from the Weald:
but chance brought me farther south, and the character and life of the
village people when I came to know them made this appear the best place
to be in.

The Plain itself is not a precisely denned area, and may be made to
include as much or little as will suit the writer's purpose. If you want
a continuous plain, with no dividing valley cutting through it, you must
place it between the Avon and Wylye Rivers, a distance about fifteen
miles broad and as many long, with the village of Tilshead in its
centure; or, if you don't mind the valleys, you can say it extends from
Downton and Tollard Royal south of Salisbury to the Pewsey vale in the
north, and from the Hampshire border on the east side to Dorset and
Somerset on the west, about twenty-five to thirty miles each way. My own
range is over this larger Salisbury Plain, which includes the River
Ebble, or Ebele, with its numerous interesting villages, from Odstock
and Combe Bisset, near Salisbury and "the Chalks," to pretty Alvediston
near the Dorset line, and all those in the Nadder valley, and westward
to White Sheet Hill above Mere. You can picture this high chalk country