"BUT STILL A RUBY KINDLES IN THE VINE" Between the North and South Downs in the east of Sussex lies a wide tract of pleasant homely country which, during certain months of those years, was subject to a strange phenomenon.

Listen on a still day when the clouds were low, or at night when the birds were all asleep, and you heard a faint, soft thud, so very faint that it was rather a convulsion of the air than an actual sound.

Fancy might paint it as the tap of an enormous muffled drum beaten at a giant's funeral leagues and leagues away.

It was not the roll of thunder.

There was no crash, however distant, along the sky.