s whom I call Oreads, for want of a homelier word,
haunt and are to be seen now and then. I know, because I myself have
seen them.

I must describe this Oread-Valley more particularly, I believe. East
and west, above it, runs the old road we call the Race-Plain--the
highest ground hereabouts, rising from Harnham by Salisbury to end at
Shaftesbury in Dorset. North of this ridge is Chesilbury Camp;
immediately south of that is the valley. Here the falling flood as it
drained away must have sucked the soil out sharply at two neighbouring
points, for this valley has two heads, and between them stands a
grass-grown bluff. The western vale-head is quite round but very
steep. It faces due south and has been found grateful by thorns,
elders, bracken and even heather. But the eastern head is sharper,
begins almost in a point. From that it sweeps out in a huge demi-lune
of cliff, the outer cord being the east, the inner hugging the bluff.
Facing north from the valley, facing these two heads, you see the
eastern of them like a great amphitheatre, its steep embayed side so
smooth as to seem the work of men's hands. It is too steep for turf;
it is grey with marl, and patchy where scree of flint and chalk has
run and found a lodgment. Ice-worn it may be, man-wrought it is not.
No red-deer picks have been at work there, no bright-eyed, scrambling
hordes have toiled their shifts or left traces through the centuries
as at the Devil's Dyke. This noble arena is Nature's. Here I saw her
people more than once. And the first sign I had of them was this.

I

I was here alone one summer's night; a night of stars, but without a
moon. I lay within the scrub of the western valley-head and looked
south. I could just see the profile of the enfolding hills, but only
just; could guess that in the soft blackness below me, filling up the
foreground like a lake, the valley was there indeed; realise that if I
stepped down, perhaps thirty yards or so, my feet would sink into the
pile of the turf-carpet, and feel the sharp benediction of the dew.
About me surged and beat an enormous silence. The only sound at
all--and that was fitful--came from a fern-owl which, from a
thorn-bush above me, churred softly and at intervals his content with
the night.

The stars were myriad, but sky-marks shone out; the Bear, the Belt,
the Chair, the dancing sister Pleiades. The Galaxy was like a
snow-cloud; startlingly, by one, by two, meteors flared a short
course a