great folk at Farringdon.  Then there’s Pusey.  You’ve heard of the Pusey horn, which King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned out of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire nights.  And the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas town.  How the whole countryside teems with Saxon names and memories!  And the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside, where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk, “the cloister walk,” and its peerless terraced gardens.  There they all are, and twenty things beside, for those who care about them, and have eyes.  And these are the sort of things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country neighbourhood.

Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not?  Well, well, I’ve done what I can to make you; and if you will go gadding over half Europe now, every holidays, I can’t help it.  I was born and bred a west-country man, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular “Angular Saxon,” the very soul of me adscriptus glebae.  There’s nothing like the old country-side for me, and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale; and I say with “Gaarge Ridler,” the old west-country yeoman,—­

     “Throo aall the waarld owld Gaarge would bwoast,
     Commend me to merry owld England mwoast;
     While vools gwoes prating vur and nigh,
     We stwops at whum, my dog and I.”

Here, at any rate, lived and stopped at home Squire Brown, J.P. for the county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse range.  And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and begat sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times.  And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico shirts, and smock frocks, and comforting drinks to the old folks with the “rheumatiz,” and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes’ clubs going, for yule-tide, when the bands of mummers came round, dressed out in ribbons and coloured paper caps, and stamped round the Squire’s kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular the legend of St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound doctor, who plays his part at healing the Saint—­a relic, I believe, of the old Middle-age mysteries.  It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to witness it, at the mature age of three years.  Tom was the eldest child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the family characteristics in great strength.  He was a hearty, strong boy from the first, given