The top is a league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf, thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble beeches--a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds for only inhabitants.

From the highest point where a famous gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the sea and where there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's Punch Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom.

This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage.

Here a very pretty little bird comedy was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just escaped from the large cage where they had always lived, and all the family were excitedly engaged in trying to recapture them.

They were delightful to see--those two pretty blue birds with red legs running busily about on the green lawn, eagerly searching for something to eat and finding nothing.