LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Portrait of the author, from A photograph by Messrs.  SHAWCROSS.

Stoke Poges church.

The old manor house.

Inscription on porch of manor house.

Interior of manor house.

In the garden.

A cotswold manor house.

Cotswold cottages.

A farmhouse by the Coln.

An old cottage.

The hamlet.

On the wolds.

Oxen ploughing.

The old customer.

The old mill, Ablington.

The Coln near Bibury.

A bridge over the Coln.

A dish of fish.

Burford priory.

Burford priory.

The manor house, Coln-st.-Aldwyns.

Bibury street.

Arlington row.

Village cricketers.

Hawking.

Bibury court.

The abbey gateway, cirencester.

Market-place, cirencester.

An old barn.

The “Pill” Bridge.

In Bibury village.

Side view of manor house.

Bibury mill.

Below the “Pill”.

Ablington manor.

An old-fashioned labouring couple.

Coln-st.-Aldwyns.

[Illustration:  Stoke Poges Church. 019.png]

A cotswold village.

CHAPTER I.

FLYING WESTWARDS.

London is becoming miserably hot and dusty; everybody who can get away is rushing off, north, south, east, and west, some to the seaside, others to pleasant country houses.  Who will fly with me westwards to the land of golden sunshine and silvery trout streams, the land of breezy uplands and valleys nestling under limestone hills, where the scream of the railway whistle is seldom heard and the smoke of the factory darkens not the long summer days?  Away, in the smooth “Flying Dutchman”; past Windsor’s glorious towers and Eton’s playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous “Elegy” was written, and where, hard by “those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,” yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray.  How those lines run in one’s head this bright summer evening, as from our railway carriage we note the great white dome of Stoke House peeping out amid the elms! whilst every field reminds us of him who wrote those lilting stanzas long, long ago.