side, left by
her Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and
the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys
for the ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you
won't forget, a place to open a man's soul, and make him prophesy, as
he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord
before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the
right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along
which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the
Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest
back of the hills--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him
to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he could not,
neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.

And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on
the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for
Englishmen--more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones
lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his
great battle, the battle of Ashdown ("Aescendum" in the chroniclers),
which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The
Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing--the whole crown
of the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher
ground," as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from
London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair Vale, Alfred's
own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as
they did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the
lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree,
marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have
seen)." Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the
"single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day,
just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since--an
old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least, if it isn't the
same tree it ought to have been, for it's just in the place where the
battle must have been won or lost--"around which, as I was saying, the
two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in
this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls
fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same
p