Endless motors turn the corner, and carts and drays, vans and bicycles and carriages. Goodwood is the

moon, and these the rising waters.

We had ourselves by this time engaged seats in a motor, and our company was a man and his wife. She had been lately on a trip to Toronto where her brother lived, and it was apparent that she nagged her husband to settle there. For this pair, again, the colonies seemed the only hope of better living. There were five of us crowded in the tonneau, and we all sat thin and trod on one anothers' toes.

We detoured through Slindon, and it is here that Hilaire Belloc is said to live. I leaned from the window and found an old house within a garden that I can only hope is his. "If I ever become a rich man," I repeat again his verses,

Or if ever I grow to be old,

I will build a house with deep thatch

To shelter me from the cold,

And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.

I will hold my house in the high wood
Within a walk of the sea,

And the men who were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.

We had passed the house before I could discover whether there was deep thatch upon it. But as Slindon is fully six miles from the sea, it must be that Belloc is still young and poor.

Nothing that Hilaire Belloc has written bears a

deeper charm than his Four Men. It is no more than the account of a walk from the border of Kent to this district of Slindon, but the pages are so rich in beauty

JULIA FLORY

I will build a house with deep thatch

and humor that I have not dared read it lately lest I abandon my own book in disgust. I still have dirty work ahead and must not shatter my morale. It is the

kind of book that goes better in a second reading, and best in a third. Its wisdom is packed within an easy style that runs without a whip.

At Slindon we turned west with Eartham on the north. It was at Eartham that Hayley lived, and I hope that fact interests you more than it does me. I am reminded, but with a difference, of William Dean Howells's visit to the accredited tomb of Tasso. "I went" he writes, "and paid this homage in the coalcellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read."

But Cowper came to Slindon to visit Hayley, all of which is recorded in his letters. The two men spent their mornings on Latin and Italian poetry, but Cowper's own verse lagged. "I am in truth," he wrote, 'so unaccountably local in the use of my pen, like the man in the fable who could leap nowhere but at Rhodes, I seem incapable of writing at all except at Weston."

66

Hereabouts we crossed the Stane Street, which ran in Roman days direct from Chichester to London and is still used for a course of several miles. Straight it ran to the shoulder of Leith Hill, and it is amazing how a direction concealed by different levels could hit so squarely on the mark without a survey.

Presently we entered Goodwood Park in a close procession of motors. An American fancies a racing meet as a public thing; yet here was a concourse gathering on private land where giant trees hung upon the road and meadows swept across a valley of grazing cattle. The race course is at the north end of the Park, and for a mile or so we followed the crowded traffic.

G

mond, and the entrance fee of several thousand

persons must do its bit toward the upkeep of the house. In a country where an unsocial brand marks down the merchant it seems odd to a foreigner that a duke can set up a turnstile on his meadows and exact shillings without staining his coronet. But the King is often a guest on these days of racing, so doubtless his escutcheon is unblemished. Anything that concerns a horse is entirely proper to the English. A prime minister might turn veterinary without shattering his position.

There are persons so keen for sport that the back

ground of it is nothing. Yet when Goodwood was first called "glorious," nature must have had a hand in the choosing of the adjective. The course is in high, wooded country, with hills and extensive prospects everywhere across an emerald world. On the morning of our arrival one might have thought that nature had selected its brightest pigments and whistled to the rain to keep the color fresh. We left our motor in a meadow where several hundred cars were parked, and, crossing a grove, came upon the buildings along the course.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, because of foreign wars, horse-racing declined; but when Napoleon was defeated the sport revived. The Goodwood races were established in eighteen hundred and two, but languished until about eighteen twenty-four. There is now a meet of three days each year.

The course is not flat like a trotting oval, for it lies in a rolling country. Nor is it shaped like a monstrous egg, with the start and finish at a single wire. Goodwood is several courses, all of different lengths. Each course starts from its own station in the meadows to join the others in the home stretch. For a spurt it is a straightaway along a waving surface, and when the pistol is fired every one stands on tiptoe for a first sight of the ponies as they appear above the hilltop. A longer race is dispatched in a distant meadow, with a gruelling slope to the level of the final stretch. These courses are of close-cut turf, rolled to the smoothness of a golf fairway.

In my ignorance I had expected to see a huge stand as at an American trotting race. There were stands,