ED AND WITNESSED]

"These persons, whose names are hereunder printed, have seene this
serpent, beside divers others, as the carrier of Horsam, who lieth at
the White Horse in Southwarke, and who can certifie the truth of all
that has been here related.

John Steele.
Christopher Holder.
And a Widow Woman
dwelling nere Faygate."

It would be very interesting to know what John Steele, Christopher
Holder, and the widow woman really saw. Such a story must have had a
basis of some kind. A printed narrative such as this would hardly have
proceeded from a clear sky.

St. Leonard's Forest has another familiar; for there the headless
horseman rides, not on his own horse, but on yours, seated on the
crupper with his ghostly arms encircling your waist. His name is
Powlett, but I know no more, except that his presence is an additional
reason why one should explore the forest on foot.

[Sidenote: SUSSEX NIGHTINGALES]

Sussex, especially near the coast, is naturally a good nightingale
country. Many of the birds, pausing there after their long journey at
the end of April, do not fly farther, but make their home where they
first alight. I know of one meadow and copse under the north escarpment
of the Downs where three nightingales singing in rivalry in a triangle
(the perfect condition) can be counted upon in May, by night, and often
by day too, as surely as the rising and setting of the sun. But in St.
Leonard's Forest the nightingale never sings. American visitors who, as
Mr. John Burroughs once did, come to England in the spring to hear the
nightingale, must remember this.

CHAPTER XIV

WEST GRINSTEAD, COWFOLD AND HENFIELD

"The Rape of the Lock"--Knepp castle--The Cowfold
brass--Carthusians in Sussex--The Oakendene cricketers--Fourteen
Golden Orioles on Henfield common--A Henfield botanist--Dr. Thomas
Stapleton's merits--A good epitaph--Sussex humour.

West Grinstead is perhaps the most remarkable of the villages on the
line from Horsham to Steyning, by reason of its association with
literature, _The Rape of the Lock_ having been to a large extent
composed beneath a tree in the park. Yet as one walks through this broad
expanse of brake-fern, among which the deer are grazing, with the line
of the Do