The amateur nature-lover proceeds over the down, appreciating all this as hard as he can appreciate, and anon gazing up at the grey and white cloud shapes melting slowly from this form to that, and showing lakes, and wide expanses, and serene distances of blue between their gaps.  And then he looks round him for a zoological item.  Underfoot the grass of the down is recovering from the summer drought and growing soft and green again, and plentiful little flattened snail shells lie about, and here and there a late harebell still nods in the breeze.  Yonder bolts a rabbit, and then something whizzes by the amateur nature-lover’s ear.

They shoot here somewhere, he remembers suddenly; and then looking round, in a palpitating state, is reassured by the spectacle of a lone golfer looming over the brow of the down, and gesticulating black and weird against the sky.  The Londoner, with an abrupt affectation of nonchalance, flings himself flat upon his back, and so remains comparatively safe until the golfer has passed.  These golfers are strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except that many are bright red about the middle, and they repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling; muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their career,—­demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing.  And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg.  And so they pass and are gone.

Rising, the amateur nature-lover finds he has been reclining on a puff-ball.  These puff-balls are certainly the most remarkable example of adaptation to circumstances known to English botanists.  They grow abundantly on golf grounds, and are exactly like golf-balls in external appearance.  They are, however, Pharisees and whited sepulchres, and within they are full of a soft mess of a most unpleasant appearance—­the amateur nature-lover has some on him now—­which stuff contains the spores.  It is a case of what naturalists call “mimicry”—­one of nature’s countless adaptations.  The golf-player smites these things with force, covering himself with ridicule—­and spores, and so disseminating this far-sighted and ingenious fungus far and wide about the links.

The amateur nature-lover passes off the down, and towards Banstead village.  He is on the watch for characteristic objects of the countryside, and rustling through the leaves beneath a chestnut avenue he comes upon an old boot.  It is a very, very old boot, all its blacking washed off by the rain, and two spreading chestnut leaves, yellow they are with blotches of green, with their broad fingers extended,