Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing “Dulce Domum” at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round.  We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home.  And so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again and again, till we made friends of them all.  We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries and no countries.  No doubt it’s all right; I dare say it is.  This is the day of large views, and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn’t gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn’t carried away Alfred’s Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid.  As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire.  Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him—­heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent—­can consume the ground at such times.  There being little ploughland, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting.  The villages are straggling, queer, 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 gray 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 bricks 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.