Page:The English Peasant.djvu/177

 (Golden Hours, 1871.)

It was June, "rosy June," as old Waller calls her, when I set out on a ramble to Chanctonbery Ring. No one who has been in West Sussex can have failed to have noticed its dark crown of wood rising above the Downs, but it is just a little out of the beaten track, and few pedestrians ever make their way to it.

Starting from the little station at Goring, I found I had to go through the woods. At times the road became quite wild and picturesque the yellow iris was in bloom, "lighting up with its golden beam" the wayside marsh. Emerging from the woods, I turned into a path leading to Findon, a little village where I purposed resting.

Then my road skirted a chalk-pit and passed a mill, where I sought the miller, who was at his tea, but who readily give me all the information I required. What a curious race some of these South Down millers have been! Every visitor at Worthing has seen the miller's tomb at Highdown Hill. This worthy not only had his grave prepared long before his death, but kept his coffin ready, wheeling it on castors every night underneath his bed.

The South Down villages are amongst the quietest spots in the world. You see a cluster of lowly habitations built of flints or boulders, with little gardens stocked with roses and wallflowers. The cottages are mostly thatched, and look wonderfully cosy. Then amongst the tall elms or ashes—and they are tall in these sheltered spots, mighty giant—stands the old farmhouse, an ancient, high-roofed, gable-pointed building, surrounded by barns and stables and haystacks, with circular pigeon-house, all suggestive 163