his wife would not undertake such a task.  But she had seen so much suffering amongst the poor people that she decided to go through the ordeal for their sakes, and the day was fixed, when she would ride through the town.  Orders were given by the people that everybody should darken their windows and retire to the back part of their houses until Lady Godiva had passed.  All obeyed except one man, “Tom the Tailor,” afterwards nicknamed “Peeping Tom,” who, as the lady rode by on her palfrey, enveloped in her long tresses of hair, which fell round her as a garment, looked down on her from his window, and of him the historian related that “his eyes chopped out of his head even as he looked.”  The ride ended, the taxes were repealed, and ever afterwards the good Lady Godiva was enshrined in the hearts of the people of Coventry.  Many years later a beautiful stained-glass window was placed in the Parish Church to commemorate this famous event, and Leofric was portrayed thereon as presenting Godiva with a charter bearing the words: 

  I Luriche for love of thee
  Doe make Coventry toll free.

[Illustration:  THOMAS PARR =_The Olde, Old, very Olde Man or Thomas Par, the Sonne of John Parr of Winnington in the Parish of Alberbury.  In the County of Shropshire who was Borne in 1483 in The Raigne of King Edward the 4th and is now living in The Strand, being aged 152 yeares and odd Monethes 1635 He dyed November the 15th And is now buryed in Westminster 1635_=]

This story Tennyson has immortalised, and its memory is still perpetuated in the pageants which are held from time to time in the city.  Coventry was described in 1642 by Jeremiah Wharton, an officer under the Earl of Essex in the Parliamentary Army, as “a City environed with a wall, co-equal with, if not exceeding, that of London, for breadth and height, and with gates and battlements, and magnificent churches and stately streets, and abundant fountains of water, altogether a place very sweetly situated, and where there was no lack of venison.”  The walls of Coventry, begun in the year 1355, were very formidable, being six yards high and three yards thick, and having thirty-two towers and twelve principal gates.  They defied both Edward IV and Charles I when with their armies they appeared before them and demanded admission, but they were demolished after the Civil War by order of Charles II, because the people of Coventry had refused admission to his father, King Charles I. Coventry possessed a greater number of archives than almost any other town in England, covering eight centuries and numbering over eleven thousand.  My brother was delighted to find that one of them related to a very old man named Thomas Parr, recording the fact that he passed through the town on his way to London in 1635, at the age of 152 years.  It reminded him of a family medicine known as Old Parr’s Pills, which at one time was highly prized; they had been used by our grandfather, who died in his ninety-seventh