Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon.  Those of you who did so with their eyes open have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line.  The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station.  If you love English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can’t do better, the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon Road or Shrivenham station, and make your way to that highest point.  And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt country-sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours’ stay; for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for its relics of bygone times.  I only know two English neighbourhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life.  I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly, for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don’t care for England in detail may skip the chapter.

O young England! young England! you who are born into these racing railroad times, when there’s a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten in a five-weeks’ holiday, why don’t you know more of your own birthplaces?  You’re all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not—­going round Ireland, with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing boats.  And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie’s library, and half bored to death.  Well, well!  I know it has its good side.  You all patter French more or less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high art, and all that; have seen the pictures of Dresden and the Louvre, and know the taste of sour krout.  All I say is, you don’t know your own lanes and woods and fields.  Though you may be choke-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis, which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for.  And as for the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood, where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, they’re gone out of date altogether.