for blank days in barren coverts, and sully not their satisfaction with regrets.  But it will be a blank day indeed which does not carry its pleasures with it and store the mind with happy recollections.  One walk on a winter’s day over the hills from High Barnet to Edgware I reckoned sadly unproductive of the special novelties I sought, but it afforded me the contemplation of some landscapes which I can never forget, and it printed on my brain a little papier-mache-like church at Totteridge which was worth going miles to see.  Better fortune next time should be the beacon of the gentle tramp.  The long jaunt I had from Chigwell Lane Station through the pretty but unpopulous country west of Theydon Bois, uneventful as it was, made an ineffaceable mark on my memory.  I picture now the long and solitary walk across fields and woodlands, with never a soul to tell the way for miles and miles, crossing and recrossing the winding Roden, startling the partridges from the turnips, and surprising, at some sudden bend in the footpath, the rabbits at their play.  It is not without excitement to steer one’s course over unknown and forsaken ground by chart and compass.  These needful guides then prove their value, and in a hilly country an altitude-barometer is a friend not to be despised.  It is not without some pride in one’s self-reliance to find one’s self five miles from a railway station, as I did at Stapleford Abbotts; and, though my special quest was all in vain at several halting-places that day, I met with a Norman doorway at Lambourn Church which archaeologists would call a dream, the axe-work of the old masons as clean cut and as perfect as though it had been done last week; and in taking a near cut at a guess across country for Stapleford Tawney I mind me that I lost my way, or thought I had, but the mariner’s needle was true, and emerging in a green avenue I saw before me a finger-post marked “To Tawney Church.”  I took off my hat and respectfully saluted that finger-post, and was soon in the churchyard, where I haply lighted upon one of the gems of my collection, the headstone sculpture of “The Good Samaritan.”

[Illustration:  Fig. 76.  Walthamstow.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 77.  Broxbourne.]

Fig. 78.—­At Stapleford Tawney.

“To Richard Wright, died 3d March 1781,
aged 76 years.”

I have, however, an earlier study of the same subject from the churchyard at Shorne Village, near Gravesend, which, is here given for comparison, and I have seen two others at Cranbrook.  They all have some features alike, but there are differences in the treatment of details in each case.

Fig. 79.—­At Shorne.

“To Mary Layton, died Jan. 12, 1760; Joseph
Layton, died May 21, 1757; and Will. 
Holmes, died Aug. 26, 1752.”