old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down
without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners by the
sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden.
They are built chiefly of good grey stone, and thatched; though I see
that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying,
for the vale is beginning to manufacture largely both brick and tiles.
There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every
village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and
ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned homely roads,
very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still
pleasant jog-trot roads running through the great pasture lands, dotted
here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are
feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of
each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and
gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in my youth,--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins?--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences, I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale--that
is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill _always_ in
view, if you choose to turn towards him, that's the essence of a vale.
There he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion; you
never lose him as you do in hilly districts.

And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but, wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which
wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a
magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates, and ditch, and
mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old
rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say
you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land,
some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, fo