FARMYARD ECONOMY.

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tour, we came upon a well situated actually right in the middle of the churchyard, and this was being used by the villagers to obtain their supply of water; had we not seen this for ourselves, we certainly could not have credited that such a thing would be allowed in these days. At many farmhouses, too, on the way, we noticed that the pump was placed adjoining the farmyard, so that the water could hardly fail to be contaminated; indeed this most undesirable arrangement appeared to us to be the rule rather than the reverse, possibly for the convenience of watering the cattle, and those we spoke to on the matter could see no harm in the arrange

ment.

Another thing that caused us some surprise (or rather, perhaps I should more correctly say, would have done so, had we not been prepared for it by former experience) is the apparent objection that country people seem to have against admitting fresh air into their homes, for even upon the finest summer day it was nothing unusual to find all the windows of the houses and cottages we passed by strictly closed, and if a cotter had a pane broken this was sure to be carefully pasted up. Indeed, so much does this closing of windows prevail in country places, as though they were never intended to open, that we made it a rule upon arriving at our inn to first of all visit our room and at once admit a supply of fresh air thereto.

The country between Chelmsford and Witham is exceedingly beautiful, well wooded and well watered, rich in foliage, a treeful land, dotted every

here and there with pleasant rural homes, from the stately mansion standing in its finely-timbered park to the humble ivy-grown cottage with its tiny garden of old-fashioned flowers, gay of colour and sweet of perfume, but whether grand or lowly each old home was in charming harmony with its surroundings, and added therefore to the beauty of the prospect.

We passed through a country thoroughly English that day, full of the poetry of civilisation and with none of its ugliness, a peaceful pastoral land into which the bustle and haste of this busy century has not yet penetrated, a country that has changed little if any of its characteristics in all these changeful centuries. It seemed as if some magic spell was cast over all to preserve its ancient peace and quietude. Man and Nature have long been here familiar friends, and all the spreading loveliness we looked upon is the outcome of their long companionship.

Unfortunately, Englishmen, when they do condescend to travel at all at home, mostly rush to thronged watering-places or slavishly follow in well-beaten tourist tracks, fashion-led or guide-book directed; they have therefore little or no knowledge of the old-world calm, the restful quietude, the eye-delighting, heart-filling beauty of the everyday scenery of rural England, a veritable earthly paradise travelled now by few, as the grass-grown roads often but too plainly prove, and practically therefore unseen save by the local inhabitants; a country whose rare charms are unspoilt by modern prosperity or the presence

ROADSIDE ENGLAND.

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of the professional tourist, whose powers of spoiling the fairest scenery are wofully great. The majority of Englishmen know not this untravelled land, and have not therefore the deep-rooted love of it that comes alone from long intimacy, a love our ancestors held as a most precious thing; but then our forefathers lived in closer communion with Nature than we do now. The glare and flash of electricity, and the rush and roar of steam, had not blinded them to the charm of simple beauty; the restless, unabiding spirit engendered by the cheap and speedy railway had not taken possession of them. It is the mellow, homelike beauty of our ancient land, with the bloom of ages over all, that gladdens so both heart and eye, a beauty revealed only to the leisurely wanderer along its devious by-ways, tree-shaded lanes, and pleasant footpaths. The scenery of roadside England is not exciting; there is nothing very wonderful or strange about it; there is no need of strong adjectives to describe it; it is neither grand nor sublime-merely beautiful, but oh! how great is its dower of beauty! What a revelation of loveliness it is to anyone who has not yet had that delightful experience, to walk or drive through an English county simply in search of the picturesque, careless of his course, careful only to avoid large towns, and to keep as far as may be from the iron way.

At the pleasant hamlet of Boreham we came upon a well-timbered park, with two avenues of trees leading from the road to the hall; between these was a long straight stretch of water; the quaint formality of the arrangement gave the place

quite a Dutch look, whether originally intended or

not.

The church at Boreham (dedicated to St. Andrew) is very interesting, and shows a wonderful variety of styles of architecture, from the early Norman, or it may be even the earlier Saxon (for where learned archæologists dispute how can an ignorant layman feel certain ?), to the Late Perpendicular, a little history in stone to him who can read it. This church contains an exceedingly fine altartomb in a chapel built to contain it by the Earl of Sussex some time in the sixteenth century; the altar-tomb is of many-coloured marbles, with effigies of warriors in complete armour most carefully and painstakingly carved even to the smallest detail. These ancient altar-tombs with their effigies of knights must be of the greatest interest and value to the antiquary, showing as they do the arrangement and manner of wearing the armour at different past periods, so minutely finished and exactly reproduced even to a rivet, that one feels almost as though by some strange magic the ancient armour had been suddenly converted into stone; the sculptured faces, too, are veritable likenesses of the brave dead that lie in the vault beneath; we can thus in some measure gather from them what

manner of men our ancestors were. Before such work one can only stand silent and grieved that we cannot do the like; the spirit and the innate love of art that animated the workman of the past is gone. from us, alas! I fear for ever; our workmen now are workmen merely; we have only too successfully

THE MEDIEVAL CRAFTSMAN.

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turned them into machines; once they were artists. With what consummate skill, with what loved labour, the medieval craftsmen converted the meaningless marble or inanimate metal into

The stone that breathes and struggles,

The brass that seems to speak.

Shall we ever again, I wonder, approach even to the standard of the long ago, of a time (however undesirable in some respects, still for all that a glorious time) when we Englishmen were an art-loving and art-producing race. For who but an art-loving people could have conceived or raised our magnificent cathedrals, with all their wealth of beauty, their grandeur and gracefulness, the culmination of gothic glory miracles in architecture that plainly speak of the masterful inventiveness and daring genius of their designers; poems in stone that, in a moneymaking age of utility and ugliness, still stand here and there in the land, silent monuments of a lost art of building?

:

Shortly after leaving Boreham we came to an ancient farmstead, literally so drowned in greenery as to allow us merely a peep of its many gables and mighty stacks of chimneys, one of those old homes (once the yeoman's pride) to be found nowhere outside the four seas that encircle our island home. I wonder if the old-fashioned rambling farmhouse, with its great barns, rickyards, cowsheds, stabling, and picturesque outbuildings gathered around it in such a delightfully irregular manner, will endure for another generation? Of all the homes of the people, surely the old farmhouse of our boyhood days is the most de