butter and lard would grace the neatest housewife’s larder; the forms on which the pies were moulded were as pure as spotless marble.  The men and boys looked healthy and bright; their hands were smooth and clean, and their aprons white as snow.  Not one of them smoked or took snuff at his work.  I saw every process and implement employed in the construction of these pies for the market; the great tubs of pepper and spice, the huge ovens, the cooling racks, the packing room; in a word, every department and feature of the establishment.  And the best thing that I can say of it is this:  that I shall eat with better satisfaction and relish hereafter the pies bearing the brand of Evans, of Melton Mowbray, than I ever did before.  The famous Stilton cheese is another speciality of this quiet and interesting town, or of its immediate neighborhood.  So, putting the two articles of luxury and consumption together, it is rather ahead of Banbury with its cakes.

On Monday, August 11th, I resumed my walk northward, and passed through a very highly cultivated and interesting section.  About the middle of the afternoon, I reached Broughton Hill, and looked off upon the most beautiful and magnificent landscape I have yet seen in England.  It was the Belvoir Vale; and it would be worth a hundred miles’ walk to see it, if that was the only way to reach it.  It lay in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring apparently about twenty miles in length.  As I sat upon the high wall of this valley, that overlooks it on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the most highly-finished piece of pre-Raphaelite artistry that could be found in the world,—­the artistry of the plough, glorious and beautiful with the unconscious and involuntary pictures which patient human labor paints upon the canvas of Nature.  Never did I see the like before.  If Turner had the shaping of the ground entirely for an artistic purpose, it could not have been more happily formed for a display of agricultural pictures.  What might be called the physical vista made the most perfect hemiorama I ever looked upon.  The long, high, wooded ridge, including Broughton Hill, eclipsed, as it were, just half the disk of a circle twenty miles in diameter, leaving the other half in all the glow and glory that Nature and that great blind painter, Agricultural Industry, could give to it.  The valley with its foot against this mountainous ridge, put out its right arm and enfolded to its bosom a little, beautiful world of its own of about fifty miles girth.  In this embrace were included hundreds of softly-rounded hills, with their intervening valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers, plantations, groves, copses and hedge-row trees, grouped by sheer accident as picturesquely as Turner himself could have arranged them.  The elevation of the ridge on which I sat softened down all these distant hills, so that they looked only like little undulating risings by which the valley gently ascended to the blue rim of the horizon on the north.