ommons or downs, which are the dry sandy upland.

"The Moor" is in many places impassable, but the blown sand has
fallen upon it, and has formed slight elevations, has drifted
into undulations, and these strips of rising ground, kept moist
by the water they absorb, have become covered with vegetation. It
is, moreover, possible by their means to penetrate to the heart
of, and even thread, the intricacies, and traverse the entire
region of the Moor.

But it is, at best, a wild and lonesome district, to be explored
with caution, a labyrinth, the way through which is known only to
the natives of the sandhills that dominate the marshy plain.

About thirty years ago a benevolent and beneficent landlord, in a
time of agricultural distress, gave employment to a large number
of men out of work in the construction of a causeway across the
Thursley "Moor."

But the work was of no real utility, and it is now overgrown with
weeds, and only trodden by the sportsman in pursuit of game and
the naturalist in quest of rare insects and water plants.

A considerable lake, Pudmere, or Pug--Puckmere, lies in the
Thursley marsh land, surrounded with dwarf willows and scattered
pines. These latter have sprung from the wind-blown seeds of the
plantations on higher ground. Throughout this part of the country
an autumn gale always results in the upspringing of a forest of
young pines, next year, to leeward of a clump of cone-bearing
trees. In the Moor such self-sown woods come to no ripeness. The
pines are unhealthy and stunted, hung with gray moss, and eaten
out with canker. The excessive moisture and the impenetrable
subsoil, and the shallowness of the congenial sand that encouraged
them to root make the young trees decay in adolescence.

An abundant and varied insect world has its home in the Moor. The
large brown hawkmoth darts about like an arrow. Dragon flies of
metallic blue, or striped yellow and brown, hover above the lanes
of water, lost in admiration of their own gorgeous selves reflected
in the still surface. The great water-beetle booms against the head
of the intruder, and then drops as a stone into the pool at his
feet. Effets, saffron yellow bellied, with striped backs, swim in
the ponds or crawl at their bottom. The natterjack, so rare
elsewhere, differing from a toad in that it has a yellow band down
its back, has here a paradise. It may be seen at eve perched on
a stock of willow herb, or running--it does not hop--round