One of the moralists whom we sat under in our 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 it 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, for they couldn’t bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyrie.  The ground falls away rapidly on all sides.  Was there ever such turf in the whole world?  You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious.  There is always a breeze in the “camp,” as it is called; and here it lies, just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by her Majesty’s corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys for the ordnance map of Berkshire.  It is altogether a place that you won’t forget, a place to open a man’s soul, and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, “the Ridgeway” ("the Rudge,” as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest back of the hills—­such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath.  And he could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.