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and the labourer. In the ancient homes we have the stately mansion (taking the place of the lordly feudal castle), the pleasant and picturesque farmstead, and the humble cottage. Now everywhere throughout the land a fresh class is making itself apparent. Not a large land-owning one this, but a well-todo middle-class that desires a medium-sized but luxurious home with a few acres around. These new homes of the people meet the traveller's view on every hand. Almost any village that can boast of healthy and picturesque surroundings has one of these fresh comers in its vicinity. Then, too, the large farms, for want of tenants, are being converted into smaller holdings; such holdings necessitate new buildings, which are raised upon the most economical principles, the outcome of all this change being that the recent structures are plain, uninteresting, and mean-looking, in marked contrast with the old-time farmstead with its wealth of spacious barns, granaries, stabling, and the like, so suggestive of contented, abiding, and ample prosperity.

Even that pleasantly familiar and characteristic feature of the English landscape, the tangled hedgerow, is in a measure threatened; modern scientific farming (that delights in silos, steam-threshers, and machinery) has found it more profitable to keep this closely shorn and unpicturesquely prim, than to let it grow in its own charming, wild, wayward fashion: and now, but too frequently, when fresh fencing is required, wire and posts are employed as being more economical than the old-fashioned thorn, and not taking anything out of the ground.

What, I wonder, would England be without its green hedges? They are such every-day features in the country that we hardly realise how much they have to do with its beauty; but anyone who has travelled in a hedgeless land, such as America, must, on his return home, if he observes things at all, have perceived what a wonderful charm the too little appreciated hedges lend to the landscape.

But of all the modern contrivances for spoiling rural beauty (one that unfortunately asserts its hideous existence far and near), surely nothing can approach the cheap, ready-made, corrugated iron structures; they are the perfection of ugliness, but they are economical; and in this competitive moneyseeking age, what is beauty in the balance with gold? An iron church made in Birmingham, purchased to seat so many persons at so much a head, set up in the midst of the pleasant green country, is as great an eyesore as can be conceived, the worst enemy to rural beauty I wot of, and I would pray in a barn rather than worship in such a fane. Little wonder indeed that Mr. Ruskin became wrathful and indignant when asked to subscribe towards an iron church, and this is how he replied to the request: I am scornfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing. . . . Can't you preach and pray behind hedges-or in a sandpit-or a coal-hole-first ? And of all manner of churches idiotically built, iron churches are the damnablest to me.'

Fortunately, in the country, churches of corrugated iron (set up, be it marked, not built) are rare;

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but now and again they are to be found ruining the fair prospect. Fancy setting up such a fane ad majorem Dei gloriam! But though churches of this kind do not happily at the present abound, other sorts of iron structures are, alas! but too frequently to be met with in rural England. These are used for all kinds of purposes, for village schools, small roadside stations, outbuildings on farms, shelters for haystacks, workshops, tool and boat houses, and the like.

The other day I took a drive to sketch a charming sixteenth-century farmstead (an old friend of mine), an ancient house of many gables, great stacks of chimneys, and quaint windows of leaded lattice. panes a picture rather than a house built for man's convenience. That dear old farmstead, with its timetinted walls and lichen-laden roof, have I not sketched it from almost every point of view? Fancy, then, my feelings, upon arriving at my old painting ground, to find that some agent from Birmingham had persuaded the farmer to purchase and erect one of these detestable iron structures, spoiling the restful look and picturesqueness of the place. Unfortunately it happened the farmer had pressing need of an outbuilding, for most of the old ones had fallen into useless decay, and the necessity of hard times had compelled him to obtain a shelter for his wagons as cheaply as he could. Necessity is a bad taskmaster.

Even in the minor matter of dress a considerable and regrettable change for the worse (picturesquely considered) has taken place in the country during the last quarter of a century. The once familiar

smock-frock (generally white or cream-coloured, but sometimes of other tints), always with much pains and to the pride of the wearer embroidered down the front and back, is no longer to be seen, save in the most remote districts. On a Sunday, instead of the characteristically clean smock-frock (smart-frock I have heard it termed in times past), an ill-fitting rusty black or grey coat is worn, with no character about it. The farmer's wife, too, now studies the latest Paris fashions in the cheap illustrated papers or magazines, and she endeavours to follow them as far as possible consistently with her means. Provincialisms are no more; one monotonous level of uniformity prevails: local peculiarities in dress, such as red cloaks, the way of wearing shawls, pattens for wet weather, the curious hats for women, that used to prevail in parts of Wales, are no longer to be found. London fashions at second hand follow the traveller everywhere, greatly to the loss of the lover of the picturesque, and sadly to the trouble of the artist who wishes to introduce rural figures into his country scenes.

We made a short détour from our stage that day to visit the curious round church at Little Maplestead. This peculiar structure of flint, with stone facings, has been so much altered and restored as almost to have ceased to be an ancient building, having little old about it but its history. This is the smallest and latest of the four early round churches that still exist in England, and owes its origin to the knights hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem. The other three are the Temple in

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London, formerly the head-quarters of the Knights Templars, the church of St. Sepulchre at Cambridge, and another of the same title at Northampton. There is still another circular church in England, St. Peter's at Cheltenham, but this is modern, and therefore more curious than interesting. The church at Little Maplestead is only thirty feet in diameter; it possesses a curious Norman font of rude workmanship, which is now, thanks to the restoration and rebuilding, of more interest to ecclesiologists and antiquaries than the church itself. Then, passing through a picturesquely wooded country, we arrived at Halstead and obtained very comfortable quarters at the George.

Halstead we found to be a pleasant and prosperous little town, agreeably situated on the Colne, an old-fashioned place with some ancient buildings, one of which especially interested us, a quaint and very old inn, with carved gables, called 'Ye White Hart.' But, like all old towns, Halstead is every year gradually getting newer and less picturesque. Here in the evening a detachment of the Salvation Army held a noisy gathering right in front of our hotel, with banners and with drum, which gathering effectually prevented our reading or talking by the noise it made. It does seem rather hard, even in a free country, that one cannot be sure of taking one's quiet in one's inn. I have till lately lived under the mistaken impression that it was one of the inherent privileges of being an Englishman that he could enjoy himself, without let or hindrance, so long as he did not transgress against the law of the land