ABLINGTON MANOR.

AN OLD-FASHIONED LABOURING COUPLE.

COLN-ST.-ALDWYNS.

[Illustration: Stoke Poges Church. 019.png]

A COTSWOLD VILLAGE.



CHAPTER I.

FLYING WESTWARDS.

London is becoming miserably hot and dusty; everybody who can get away
is rushing off, north, south, east, and west, some to the seaside,
others to pleasant country houses. Who will fly with me westwards to the
land of golden sunshine and silvery trout streams, the land of breezy
uplands and valleys nestling under limestone hills, where the scream of
the railway whistle is seldom heard and the smoke of the factory
darkens not the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman";
past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the
little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous
"Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that
yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How
those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our
railway carriage we note the great white dome of Stoke House peeping out