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| 1 | 65 | 130 | 195 | 260 |
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that morning on the Portsmouth road," and lower, "I never shall forget."
At Northchapel Mr. Hoopdriver consulted his map and took counsel and
weighed his course of action. Petworth seemed a possible resting-place,
or Pullborough; Midhurst seemed too near, and any place over the Downs
beyond, too far, and so he meandered towards Petworth, posing himself
perpetually and loitering, gathering wild flowers and wondering why they
had no names--for he had never heard of any--dropping them furtively
at the sight of a stranger, and generally 'mucking about.' There
were purple vetches in the hedges, meadowsweet, honeysuckle, belated
brambles--but the dog-roses had already gone; there were green and red
blackberries, stellarias, and dandelions, and in another place white
dead nettles, traveller's-joy, clinging bedstraw, grasses flowering,
white campions, and ragged robins. One cornfield was glorious with
poppies, bright scarlet and purple white, and the blue corn-flowers were
beginning. In the lanes the trees met overhead, and the wisps of hay
still hung to the straggling hedges. Iri one of the main roads he
steered a perilous passage through a dozen surly dun oxen. Here and
there were little cottages, and picturesque beer-houses with the vivid
brewers' boards of blue and scarlet, and once a broad green and a
church, and an expanse of some hundred houses or so. Then he came to
a pebbly rivulet that emerged between clumps of sedge loosestrife and
forget-me-nots under an arch of trees, and rippled across the road,
and there he dismounted, longing to take off shoes and stockings--those
stylish chequered stockings were now all dimmed with dust--and paddle
his lean legs in the chuckling cheerful water. But instead he sat in
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