On my return I diverged to the right along a green bridle path, and thus made a circuit of the hamlet.
Before reaching Winchester (two miles) I passed a large tree standing up quite dead, a piteous skeleton, shining and bleaching in the sun. It had been struck with lightning, I was told. I never before saw such a sight; but in Australia, where the settlers pay the natives to ring-bark the trees, you may see forests of them raising up their bare arms to heaven, as if appealing against the treatment they had received.
Saint Peter Cheesehill from above the Station.
Passing Chilcombe Lodge, with its cypresses, I came to an old inn called “The Brewers Arms,” and was told that a hostel formerly called “The Drum” had stood on this site for four hundred years. Close to it is the church of St. Peter’s Cheesehill. The people call it “Chisel”; it is named from gravel like the Chesil Beach near Weymouth. The church is square like St. John’s. It contains some handsome chalk niches, with heads carved under them, and there is a curious grating high up in the west wall for those in the adjoining house to hear the service.
Twyford.
A pleasant walk leads from the bridge along the bank of the river to Twyford—three miles distant—but I started in that direction through Southgate Street, which is part of the Southampton Road. After passing St. Cross and proceeding on for about a half-mile, I came to a bifurcation and a signpost, and took the lower road to the left, walking by grassy banks golden with fleabane. I crossed the Itchen, and soon a branch of that river—fringed with a line of wild foliage, purple willow-herb and hemp agrimony. Then I reached Twyford Lodge, the residence of Colonel Bates, and farther on took the right-hand turning to the church. It is modern except the window, but stands on a ring of prehistoric monoliths, preserving the old sanctity of the place. The graveyard is adorned with some magnificent coniferæ, specimens of the Wellingtonia, deodara, picea pinsapo, cypress, and cedar; but the pride of the whole is an immense yew-tree which rises in the centre in ancient majesty. It is of great girth, and withal as sound as a bell, and it is cut into the form of one—or, I might say, of Robinson Crusoe’s umbrella. Go beneath it and gaze up into its maze of branches—a wondrous sight!
On leaving this shrubbery I turned round to the left, and, had I desired, I could have walked through “silken grass,” across a couple of fields, to the railway station, passing by the woods round Shawford Park (Sir Charles Frederick’s), and over the river, which is here divided into three parts.[105] But I sat down to rest upon a seat placed by some fairy godmother at the first bridge, and looked down into the Itchen, where the long green foliage was waving like the hair of water nymphs. Does not Tennyson speak of our life swaying “like those long mosses in the stream”? I seemed to be looking down into a clear agate and the liquid murmur was only broken at intervals by the jumping of a trout.
Before me lay two elephantine blocks of stone, brought by some of our unknown predecessors. I amused myself with conjuring up pictures of the past, and thinking that here—
“Sage beneath the spreading oak,