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It gave him the same pleasure to talk of England and of his corner of England that it gives some venerable people sometimes to talk of those whom they have loved in youth, or that it gives the true poets to mouth the lines of their immortal peers. It was a satisfaction to hear him say the things he said, because one knew that as he said them his soul was filled.

He spoke also of horses and of the birds native to our Downs, but not of pheasants, which he hated and would not speak to me about at all. He spoke of dogs, and told me how the dogs of one countryside were the fruits of it, just as its climate and its contours were; notably the spaniel, which was designed or bred by the mighty power of Amberley Wildbrook, which breeds all watery things. He showed me how the plover went with the waste flats of Arun and of Adur and of Ouse, and he showed me why the sheep were white and why they bunched together in a herd. “Because,” he said, “the chalk pits and the clouds behind the Down are wide patches of white; so must the sheep be also.” For a little he would have told me that the very names of places, nay, the religion itself, were grown right out of the sacred earth which was our Mother.