The place is tremulous and vibrating with life; the wagtail by the water, the water itself, the leaves dancing to the breeze, and the birds amid the leaves: the lost butterfly, the gauze-blue dragonfly, the midges in their interminable dance, all keep up an accompaniment to the flute-like tune of the river. Then, as one muses, the thousand snippets of beauty and life, gay and free and ephemeral, that make up the beauty of a summer's afternoon, suddenly, as if touched by a magic wand, lose their ephemeral nature and become their immortal selves.
"They were old when I was young. The wind blew their songs in the faces of the legionaries; before the phalanx flew the butterfly, and the water wagtails before the glittering eagles."
Thus speaks the road in answer to the river, making the charm of this place—a charm felt even by the teamsters of a summer's afternoon as they halt their horses for a rest.
On either side of the road, down here, stretch woods; mellow-hearted English woods, nut copses, beech glades, willow brakes; the home of the squirrel and the pheasant and the wood-dove. The cork-screw note of the cock pheasant answers the poetical lamentation of the dove; that caressing sound, soothing, sleep-drugged, and fatuous.
In spring the children of Crowsnest come here for the wood violets burning blue amid the brown last autumn leaves; the glades are purple with the wild hyacinths, and the voice of the cuckoo here is a thing never to be forgotten. In autumn the children come for nuts. No poem of tone or word conceived by man can approach the poetry of these glades; no picture their simple beauty; they are the home of Oberon and Titania, and they are rented by Colonel Bingham.
The Colonel lives, or lived at the time of this story, at the Hall, which is the chief house of the neighbourhood—a neighbourhood parcelled up into small country seats. Three acres and a house would about constitute one of these seats, and they stretch right round the hill of Crowsnest, invading even the rise of the Downs.
The bungalow is situated on the Downs; a good road of fairly easy ascent leads up to it, and looking from the verandah of the bungalow you can see, below, the roofs of all the country seats, the walls forming their frontiers, and, with a good glass, the seat-holders promenading in their gardens.
From here the Roman road looks like a white cotton ribbon; the woods and gardens, the tennis lawns no bigger than billiard-tables, the red-tiled houses no larger than rabbit hutches, form a pretty enough picture to smoke a cigarette and ponder over on a warm afternoon. The people down there seem playing at life, and finding the game pleasant enough, to judge from their surroundings. They look very small even when viewed with the aid of a lens.
Raising your eyes suddenly from those toy houses, those trim and tiny lawns, those gardens threaded with the scarlet of geraniums, you see Sussex in one great sweep of country, just as by the river you saw the past in the monolithic Roman road. Woods upon woods, domes and vales of foliage, and, to the south, the continuation of the Downs on which you are standing.