pretty and correct, but with no character or force.  I suppose that fifty years hence, when our taste has broadened somewhat, this window will probably be condemned as impossible too.  There can be no absolute canon of beauty; the only principle ought to be to spare everything that is of careful and solid workmanship, to give it a chance, to let time and age have their perfect work.  It is the utter conventionality of the whole thing that is so distressing; the same thing is going on all over the country, the attempt to put back the clock, and to try and restore things as they were; history, tradition, association, are not considered.  The old builders were equally ruthless, it is true; they would sweep away a Norman choir to build a Decorated one; but at all events they were advancing and expanding, not feebly recurring to a past period of taste, and trying to obliterate the progress of the centuries.

About noon I left the little town, and struck out up a winding lane to the hills.  The copses were full of anemones and primroses; birds sang sharply in the bushes which were gemmed with fresh green; now and then I heard the woodpecker laugh as if at some secret jest among the thickets.  Presently the little town was at my feet, looking small and tranquil in the golden noon; and soon I came to the top.  It was grassy, open down-land up here, and in an instant the wide view of a rich wooded and watered plain spread before me, with shadowy hills on the horizon.  In the middle distance I saw the red roofs of a great town, the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a crescent of silver.  It was England indeed—­tranquil, healthy, prosperous England.

The rest of the day I need not record.  It was full of delicate impressions—­an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through a gap, the purple, wealthy plain.

I write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under the hill.  The name alone, Wenge Grandmain, is worth a shilling.  It is very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home.  And so, in a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, I sit while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street.

The CROSSFOXES inn,
Bourton-on-the-wold,
April 16, 1904.

Dear Herbert,—­I have now been ten days on my travels, but for the last week I have pitched my moving tent at Bourton.  Do you shudder with the fear that I am going to give you pages of description of scenery?  It is not a shudder with me when I get a landscape-letter; it is merely that leaden dulness which falls upon the spirit when it is confronted with statements which produce no impression upon the mind.  I always, for instance, skip the letters of travel which appear about the third chapter of great biographies, when the young gentleman goes for the Grand Tour after taking his degree.