But how can these lumps of chalk hold water?  They are not made like cups.

No:  but they are made like sponges, which serves our turn better still.  Just take up that lump, young squire, and you’ll see water enough in it, or rather looking out of it, and staring you in the face.

Why! one side of the lump is all over thick ice.

So it is.  All that water was inside the chalk last night, till it froze.  And then it came squeezing out of the holes in the chalk in strings, as you may see it if you break the ice across.  Now you may judge for yourself how much water a load of chalk will hold, even on a dry summer’s day.  And now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I must be off to market.

Was it all true that the farmer said?

Quite true, I believe.  He is not a scientific man—­that is, he does not know the chemical causes of all these things; but his knowledge is sound and useful, because it comes from long experience.  He and his forefathers, perhaps for a thousand years and more, have been farming this country, reading Madam How’s books with very keen eyes, experimenting and watching, very carefully and rationally; making mistakes often, and failing and losing their crops and their money; but learning from their mistakes, till their empiric knowledge, as it is called, helps them to grow sometimes quite as good crops as if they had learned agricultural chemistry.

What he meant by the chalk sweetening the land you would not understand yet, and I can hardly tell you; for chemists are not yet agreed how it happens.  But he was right; and right, too, what he told you about the water inside the chalk, which is more important to us just now; for, if we follow it out, we shall surely come to a cave at last.

So now for the water in the chalk.  You can see now why the chalk-downs at Winchester are always green, even in the hottest summer:  because Madam How has put under them her great chalk sponge.  The winter rains soak into it; and the summer heat draws that rain out of it again as invisible steam, coming up from below, to keep the roots of the turf cool and moist under the blazing sun.

You love that short turf well.  You love to run and race over the Downs with your butterfly-net and hunt “chalk-hill blues,” and “marbled whites,” and “spotted burnets,” till you are hot and tired; and then to sit down and look at the quiet little old city below, with the long cathedral roof, and the tower of St. Cross, and the gray old walls and buildings shrouded by noble trees, all embosomed among the soft rounded lines of the chalk-hills; and then you begin to feel very thirsty, and cry, “Oh, if there were but springs and brooks in the Downs, as there are at home!” But all the hollows are as dry as the hill tops.  There is not a brook, or the mark of a watercourse, in one of them.  You are like the Ancient Mariner in the poem, with

   “Water, water, every where,
   Nor any drop to drink.”