[Illustration: THE SWITCHBACK ROAD, EARLSWOOD COMMON.]
He was, it seemed, a "hedger and ditcher," and his leathern gauntlets and billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench.
"I've worked at this sort o' thing," said he, in conversation, "for the last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for't too. Two and twopence a day I gets, an' works from seven o'marnings to half-past five in the afternoon for that. You'll be gettin' more than two and twopence a day when you're at work, I reckon."
To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for he had visited London, and "a dirty place it was, sure-ly." Also he had been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called "Madame Two Swords": places that Londoners generally leave to provincials. Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock sights of town than townsfolk themselves.
From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the midnight of October 31st, 1881.
At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield Castle.
Thunderfield Castle should--if tremendous names go for aught--be a stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the estate of Harrowslea--"Harsley," as the countryfolk call it--supposed to have once belonged to King Harold.
There seems to be no doubt whatever that the Anglo-Saxons _did_ name the place after the god Thunor. It was known by that name in the time of Alfred the Great, but no one knows what it was like then; nor, for that matter, what the appearance of it was when the Norman de Clares owned it. It seems never to have been a castle built of stone, but an adaptation of the primitive savage idea of surrounding a position with water and palisading it. Thunderfield was a veritable stronghold of the woods and bogs, and the defenders of it were like Hereward the Wake, who could often remain a "passive resister" and see the invaders struggling with the sloughs, the odds overwhelmingly in favour of the forces of nature.