Page:Highways and Byways in Sussex.djvu/222

194 commands a view of the county of Surrey, part of Hampshire, Berkshire, Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, some parts of Bucks, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Kent and Essex; and, by the help of a glass, Wiltshire." Not a word of Sussex.

The wisest course for the non-gregarious traveller is to leave the Dyke on the right, and, crossing the Ladies' Golf Links, gain Fulking Hill, from which the view is equally fine (save for lacking a little in the east) and where there is peace and isolation. I remember sitting one Sunday morning on Fulking Hill when a white mist like a sea filled the Weald, washing the turf slopes twenty feet or so below me. In the depths of this ocean, as it were, could be heard faintly the noises of the farms and the chime of submerged bells. Suddenly a hawk shot up and disappeared again, like a leaping fish.

The same spot was on another occasion the scene of a superb effort of courageous tenacity. I met a large hare steadily breasting the hill. Turning neither to the right nor left it was soon out of sight over the crest. Five or more minutes later there appeared in view, on the hare's trail, a very tired little fox terrier not much more than half the size of the hare. He also turned aside neither to the right nor the left, but panted wearily yet bravely past me, and so on, over the crest, after his prey. I waited for some time but the terrier never came back. Such was the purpose depicted on his countenance that I can believe he is following still.

On these Downs, near the Dyke, less than a century ago the Great Bustard used to be hunted with greyhounds. Mr. Borrer tells us in the Birds of Sussex that his grandfather (who died in 1844) sometimes would take five or six in a morning. They fought savagely and more than once injured the hounds.

Enterprise has of late been at work at the Dyke. A cable railway crosses the gully at a dizzy height, a lift brings travellers from the Weald, a wooden cannon of exceptional calibre threatens the landscape, and pictorial advertisements of the Devil and his domain may be seen at most of the Sussex