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After I had learned a great many interesting things about the life and habits of the children of the sea how in the midst of dashing waves the little polyps build the beautiful coral isles of the Pacific, and the foraminifera have made the chalk-hills of many a land my teacher read me "The Chambered Nautilus," and showed me that the shell-building process of the mollusks is symbolical of the development of the mind.
I knew him formerly, when we used to drink together to our good fellowship: he came here once to fetch his wife, she is dead now. She was the daughter of the king of the chalk-hills at Moen. They say he took his wife from chalk; I shall be delighted to see him again.
A line of clouds, a seeming mass of crumbling chalk-hills, now barred the horizon far away. Across the pure, deep blue heavens overhead, merely a few light, fleecy cloudlets were slowly drifting, like a flotilla of vessels with full-blown sails.
The annual reviews take place from June to September, the regiments of volunteers being detailed in turn to co-operate with the regular troops, so as to gain a practical knowledge of military duties. Proceeding eastward along the chalk-hills for about twelve miles, we come to the breach made in them by the valley of the Mole for the passage of that strange little river.
Standing there in the gravel-pit, I see three old worlds, in each of which these stones played their part; and this world of man for the fourth, and the best of all for man if not for the stones. I speak sober truth. Let me explain it step by step. You know the chalk-hills to the south; and the sands of Crooksbury and the Hind Head beyond them. There is one world.
The chalk-hills rise much higher than the surrounding country; but you must not therefore suppose that they were made after it, and laid on the top of it. That guess would be true, if you went south- east from here toward the Hind Head.
There I lay and rolled till I was rounded, for many a century more; till flood after flood past over me, and a new earth was made; and I was mixed up with fresh flints from wasting chalk-hills, and with freestones from the Gloucestershire wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the mountains of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast; and above me floated uprooted palms, and tropic fruits and seeds, and the wrecks of a dying world.
No part of England is more sought as a place of rural residence than this richly-gifted isle, thus set as a gem upon the southern shore of the kingdom. With the terminating western cliffs of the chalk-hills of the Isle of Wight beyond High Down we will close this pleasant journey.
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.
Cross, and the gray old walls and buildings shrouded by noble trees, all embosomed among the soft rounded lines of the chalk-hills; and then you begin to feel very thirsty, and cry, "Oh, if there were but springs and brooks in the Downs, as there are at home!" But all the hollows are as dry as the hill tops. There is not a brook, or the mark of a watercourse, in one of them.
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