em all. As for the outward and material
improvements--you know as well as I, that since free trade and
emigration, the labourers confess themselves better off than they
have been for fifty years; and though you will not see in the chalk
counties that rapid and enormous agricultural improvement which you
will in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or the Lothians, yet you shall see
enough to-day to settle for you the question whether we old-country
folk are in a state of decadence and decay. _Par exemple_--"

And Claude pointed to the clean large fields, with their neat
close-clipt hedge-rows, among which here and there stood cottages,
more than three-fourths of them new.

"Those well-drained fallow fields, ten years ago, were poor clay
pastures, fetlock deep in mire six months in the year, and accursed in
the eyes of my poor dear old friend, Squire Lavington; because they
were so full of old moles'-nests, that they threw all horses down. I
am no farmer: but they seem surely to be somewhat altered since then."

As he spoke, they turned off the main line of the rolling clays toward
the foot of the chalk hills, and began to brush through short cuttings
of blue gault and "green sand," so called by geologists, because its
usual colours are bright brown, snow-white, and crimson.

Soon they get glimpses of broad silver Whit, as she slides, with
divided streams, through bright water-meadows, and stately groves of
poplar, and abele, and pine; while, far aloft upon the left, the downs
rise steep, crowned with black fir spinnies, and dotted with dark box
and juniper.

Soon they pass old Whitford Priory, with its numberless gables,
nestling amid mighty elms, and the Nunpool flashing and roaring as of
old, and the broad shallow below sparkling and laughing in the low,
but bright December sun.

"So slides on the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the
same--always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled,"
said Stangrave,--he was given to half-mystic utterances, and
hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he
worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret
Fuller Ossoli,--"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature,
when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human
personality, a river-god of its own. It may be but a collection
of ever-changing atoms of water;--what is your body but a similar
collection of atoms, decaying and renewing every moment? Yet yo