behold! to the ordinary display what a heart-shaking addition! horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak leaves and ribbons.”  The brilliancy of the royal liveries, the thundering of the wheels, the tramp of those generous horses, the sounding of the coach horn in the calm evening air, and last, but not least, the intense enthusiasm of travellers and spectators alike, as amid such cries as “Salamanca for ever!” “Hurrah for Waterloo!” they cheered and cheered again, letting slip the dogs of victory throughout those old English villages,—­all these things must have united the hearts of the classes and masses in one common bond, rendering such occasions memorable for ever in the hearts of the simple country folk.  In small towns like Burford and Northleach, situated five or six miles from any railway station, the prosperity and happiness of the natives has suffered enormously by the decay of the stage coach; and even in smaller villages the cheering sound of the horn must have been very welcome, forming as it did a connecting link between these remote hamlets of Gloucestershire and the great metropolis a hundred miles away.

Fairford Church is known far and wide as containing the most beautiful painted glass of the early part of the sixteenth century to be found anywhere in England.  The windows, twenty-eight in number, are usually attributed to Albert Duerer; but Mr. J.G.  Joyce, who published a treatise on them some twenty years ago, together with certain other high authorities, considered them to be of English design and workmanship.  They would doubtless have been destroyed in the time of the Civil Wars by the Puritans had they not been taken down and hidden away by a member of the Oldysworth family, whose tomb is in the middle chancel.

John Tame, having purchased the manor of Fairford in 1498, immediately set about building the church.  He died two years later, and his son completed the building, and also erected two other very fine churches in the neighbourhood—­those at Rendcombe and Barnsley.  He was a great benefactor to the Cotswold country.  Leland tells us that the town of Fairford never flourished “before the cumming of the Tames into it.”

You may see John Tame’s effigy on his tomb, together with that of his wife, and underneath these pathetic lines: 

     “For thus, Love, pray for me. 
      I may not pray more, pray ye: 
      With a pater noster and an ave: 
      That my paynys relessyd be.”

If I remember rightly his helmet and other parts of his armour still hang on the church wall.  Leland describes Fairford as a “praty uplandish towne,” meaning, I suppose, that it is situated on high ground.  It is certainly a delightful old-fashioned place—­a very good type of what the Cotswold towns are like.  Chipping-Campden and Burford are, however, the two most typical Cotswold towns I know.