The day is so fine, the sun is so bright, and the sward so green, that we all squat, gipsy-fashion, on the grass, to discuss a modest lunch. Fowls crowd round us and we feed them. But one steals Foley’s cheese from off his plate, and hen steals it from hen, till the big Dorking cock gets it, and eats it too. Corn-flower scatters his oats about, and a feathered multitude surround him to pick them up. Pea-blossom brings her nosebag down with a vicious thud every now and then, and causes much confusion among the fowls.
Bob is continually snapping at the wasps.
Bread-and-cheese and ginger-ale are not bad fare on a lovely day like this, when one has an appetite.
Gipsies always have appetites.
A drunken drover starts off from the inn door without paying for his dinner. The landlady’s daughter gives chase. I offer to lend her Bob. She says she is good enough for two men like that. And so she proves.
We are very happy.
One’s spirits while on the road to a great extent rise and fall with the barometer.
Chichester seems a delightful old place. But we drove rapidly through it, only stopping to admire the cross and the cathedral. The former put me in mind of that in Castle-gate of Aberdeen.
Between Littlehampton and the small town of Botley, which the reader may notice on the map of Hampshire, we made one night’s halt, and started early next morning.
The view from the road which leads round the bay at Porchester is, even with the tide back, picturesque. Yonder is the romantic old castle of Porchester on the right middle distance, with its battlements and ivied towers; and far away on the horizon is Portsmouth, with its masts, and chimneys, and great gasworks, all asleep in the haze of this somewhat sombre and gloomy day.