A pleasant land are those hills, and wealthy; full of noble houses buried in the deep beech-woods, which once were a great forest, stretching in a ring round the north of London, full of deer and boar, and of wild bulls too, even as late as the twelfth century, according to the old legend of Thomas a Becket's father and the fair Saracen, which you have often heard.
I know.

But how are you going to get through the chalk hills?
Is there a tunnel as there is at Box and at Micheldever?
No.

Something much prettier than a tunnel and something which took a great many years longer in making.

We shall soon meet with a very remarkable and famous old gentleman, who is a great adept at digging, and at landscape gardening likewise; and he has dug out a path for himself through the chalk, which we shall take the liberty of using also.

And his name, if you wish to know it, is Father Thames.
I see him.