beautiful work, a miracle of skilled craftsmanship, and is said by ecclesiologists to be the most perfect and grandest specimen of its kind now existing, though, in our less learned opinion, the splendid carved roof of the little-known church of Cawston, which we had so lately seen (excepting that it is in a wretched state of repair, or disrepair) is little, if any, inferior to it. Nothing surprised or delighted us more on our journey than the wonderful beauty, not to say grandeur, of some of the remote country churches; seldom visited these by strangers, unless they be enthusiastic antiquaries, for they lie wholly out of the pleasure tourist's track. The exceedingly interesting and once splendid church of Sall (whose former glories are, alas! fast decaying from long neglect) was not even mentioned in our guidebook! Most of these ancient Norfolk fanes, and some of the Suffolk ones, are built of flint, cut and carefully squared, joined and laid together with infinite pains and astonishing accuracy. These old walls and towers, constructed of semi-translucent flint, have a peculiar beauty all their own, a beauty that cannot be approached by ordinary stone, and moreover, flint is the most enduring material that can be employed in building. It does not weather with age; not even granite is so lasting.

The hammer beams of the roof of St. Mary's church are carved to represent various angels, saints, martyrs, kings, and knights. There are no less than forty-two of these in all, each one being a study in itself. Amongst them we noticed St. Lawrence holding a gridiron, St. Edmund, St. Thomas à

TOMB OF MARY TUDOR.

305

Becket, with a goodly company of angels playing on musical instruments, besides bishops, kings, and armoured knights.

This church contains several tombs of interest. In the chancel we came upon a plain marble tablet, with the following inscribed thereon:

Sacred to the Memory of

MARY TUDOR,

Third Daugh of Henry ye 7th, King of England,
and Queen of France.

Who was first married in 1514 to
Louis ye 12th, King of France,
and afterwards in 1517 to
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.
She died in his lifetime in 1533,
At ye Manor of Westhorp in this Couny,
And was interred in ye same year in ye

Monastery of St. Edmund's Bury,
And was removed into this Church
After ye Dissolution of ye Abbey.

The tomb was opened last century. Why, I wonder? Cannot the noble dead be left to rest in peace, undisturbed by the prying inquisitiveness of man? On that occasion one of the churchwardens cut off a lock of the deceased queen's hair, the flaxen lock that we were shown in the museum.

One of the most ancient altar-tombs is to a John Baret, and though interesting is most ghastly to look upon. The body, laid on the top of the monument, is shown as an emaciated corpse, but a too realistic copy of one that had long been buried. The anatomy of the carving is wonderful, and the figure has a kind of morbid attraction that compels you to look at it whether you will or no. I should not care X

to attend service in view of that strange, weird memorial of the dead. On it is written in most perplexing English:

Ho that wil sadly beholde me with his ie

May se hys owyn merowr a lerne for to die.

The figure on that monument haunted us for days long after. And such is the end of poor humanity, with all its wonderful genius, its marvellous inventions, and the rare creations of its brain!

All passes,-Art alone

Enduring stays to us ;

The bust outlasts the throne-
The coin Tiberius.

There are some old brasses in the church, but none of special interest; there are likewise some modern ones, the over-perfect, precise-cut lettering of which is in marked contrast with the feeling, nervous, distinctly non-mechanical engraving of the old work. There is an individuality about the one; the inscriptions on it are full of character, like to the writing of a letter. You feel almost something of the personality of the ancient engraver; the very marks of his tool are still upon them, cut with his own hand. The modern brasses are to the old ones as is a printed leaf to a page of an ancient missal, or the mechanical chromograph to the work of the brush; and surely they are not so very precious as to need placing upon the wall (where a brass should never be), framed in oak and glazed as they are here?

As we glanced back on leaving the church, the view we had was most impressive; the glorious

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carved roof above, the soaring columns, the ancient mellowed walls, the pavement below, were charged with countless glowing tints as the softened sunshine shone through the traceried windows of stained glass reflecting their colours over all. In the churchyard here is an old tombstone, the epitaph on which, fast weathering away, is perhaps worth preserving:

Here lies Joan Kitchner; when her glass was spent,
She kicked up her heels and away she went.

Then, wandering about, we found our way to the modern Roman Catholic church, a plain structure in the too familiar style of nineteenth-century classic. The interior looked bare to us. What a contrast to the gorgeous fane formerly dedicated to St. Edmund here! In this church we noticed an alms-box made, so an inscription below informed us, from the wood of the very tree to which St. Edmund was tied when he suffered martyrdom. Was this a nest-egg for future relics, we wondered? One thing we could not help noting, that whilst all the various inscriptions in the church were in Latin, a language not understood of poor people (and sometimes not always by rich), the requests for money for the church were in very plain English.

CHAPTER XVII.

A Pleasant Country-Old Toll-gates--The Homes of the People—The Modern and the Last Century Traveller-Home Travel-Ruskin on Railways-A Picturesque Village—An Old Tudor Mansion— An Ancient Moated Manor House-The Beauty of Old Buildings -An Ideal Hostelry-The Coaching Inns of the Past-A Prosperous Farmer-One Result of Agricultural Depression-A Holiday in a Farmhouse.

In the morning, before leaving our comfortable inn, we were taken down a dark staircase to inspect the groined cellars, which, as I have before remarked, the landlord told us belonged of old to the abbey. In these we had pointed out to us the recesses said to have been used by the monks for the sacramental wines, and the built-up wall where the underground passage from the monastery is supposed to have entered. Possibly these may have been the abbey cellars, but if so, why, when they had so great a quantity of land enclosed, the monks did not construct their cellar within their own walls, instead of going such a distance away, entailing an awkward underground approach, is truly a puzzling problem.

Looking at the stone roofing, as far as we could judge by the uncertain flickering light of a tallow candle, it seemed to us that the groining was rudely done, and not at all like the usual careful masonry of the olden monks. Indeed, as the Angel stands