GILBERT WHITE'S HOUSE.
SUN-DIAL IN GILBERT WHITE'S GARDEN.
Crossing from Midhurst over the border into Hampshire, the village of Selborne is reached, one of the smallest but best known places in England from the care and minuteness with which Rev. Gilbert White has described it in his Natural History of Selborne. It is a short distance south-east of Alton and about fifty miles south-west of London, while beyond the village the chalk-hills rise to a height of three hundred feet, having a long hanging wood on the brow, known as the Hanger, made up mainly of beech trees. The village is a single straggling street three-quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered valley and running parallel with the Hanger. At each end of Selborne there rises a small rivulet, the one to the south becoming a branch of the Arun and flowing into the Channel, while the other is a branch of the Wey, which falls into the Thames. This is the pleasant little place, located in a broad parish, that Gilbert White has made famous, writing of everything concerning it, but more especially of its natural history and peculiarities of soil, its trees, fruits, and animal life. He was born at Selborne in 1720, and died there in 1793, in his seventy-third year. He was the father of English natural history, for much of what he wrote was equally applicable to other parts of the kingdom. His modest house, now overgrown with ivy, is one of the most interesting buildings in the village, and in it they still keep his study about as he left it, with the close-fronted bookcase protected by brass wire-netting, to which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin, prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the garden is still kept his sun-dial, the lawn around which is one of the softest and most perfect grass carpets in England.
SELBORNE CHURCH, FROM THE ALTON ROAD.
The pleasant little church over which White presided is as modest and almost as attractive as his house. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and measures fifty-four by forty-seven feet, being almost as broad as it is long, consisting of three aisles, and making no pretensions, he says, to antiquity. It was built in Henry VII.'s reign, is perfectly plain and unadorned, and without painted glass, carved work, sculpture, or tracery. Within it, however, are low, squat, thick pillars supporting the roof, which he thinks are Saxon and upheld the roof of a former church, which, falling into decay, was rebuilt on these massive props because their strength had preserved them from the injuries of time. They support blunt Gothic arches. He writes that he remembers when the beams of the middle aisle were hung with garlands in honor of young women of the parish who died virgins. Within the chancel is his memorial on the wall, and he rests in an unassuming grave in the churchyard. The belfry is a square embattled tower forty-five feet high, built at the western end, and he tells pleasantly how the three old bells were cast into four in 1735, and a parishioner added a fifth one at his own expense, marking its arrival by a high festival in the village, "rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of which all present were permitted to partake." The porch of the church to the southward is modern and shelters a fine Gothic doorway, whose folding doors are evidently of ancient construction. The vicarage stands alongside to the westward, an old Elizabethan house.